The hill of dreams

1 \

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

IN MEMORY OF
MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER

v/
f.\

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'1ft. «

The Hill
of Dreams

BOOKS BY ARTHUR MACSEN

THE HOUSE OF SOULS

THE SECRET GLORY

FAR OFF THINGS

THE HILL OF DREAMS

In Preparation
THINGS NEAR AND FAR
THE THREE IMPOSTORS

NMW YORK: ALFRED • A • KN(

The
Hill of Dreams

By Arthur Machen

New York

Alfred • A • Knopf

Mcmxxiii

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Published, January, 1923

Set up and printed 6i/ the Vail-Ballou Co., BingJiamton, N. Y.
Paper ftirniehed »i/ W. F. EtTwrington & Co., New York.
Bound by H. Wolff Estate, Nev York.

Cnlleg«
Library

<

Introduction

In the year 189$ I was at length certain, or al-
most certain, that I was a man of letters. I had
been, if I may put the matter thus familiarly, for
more than twelve years "on the job." In '83 I
had written a little book called "The Anatomy of
Tobacco," chiefly as a counter-irritant to loneliness
and semi-starvation. In '84 I had translated the
Heptameron of Margaret of Navarre, while '85
and '86 were devoted to the concoction of "The
Chronicle of Clemendy" a volume of medieval tales.
Another translation, a version of "Le Moyen de
Parvenir" by Beroalde de Ferville — his name is
more beautiful than his book — occupied the leisure
of my evenings somewhere about '88 and '89, the
days being given to the rendering of the "Memoirs
of Casnova" (twelve volumes) into the English
tongue.

In 1890 I was writing essays and short stories and
odds and ends and varieties for papers which have
now become ghosts: The Globe, The St. James's
Gazette, and The Whirlwind; to say nothing of
"smart" tales contributed to an extinct, or almost ex-
tinct, family of journals; the "society" papers. In

v

1181095

Introduction

'go and 'gi I wrote the "Great God Pan" which
was published at the end of 'g^ and made a mild
sort of sensation with old ladies, on the press and of
it. And in the spring and summer of 'g4 I was busy
with "The Three Impostors" which fell somewhat
flatly when it was issued in the autumn of 'g$. So,
as I say, I began to feel almost convinced towards
the end of the year i8g$ that I was in some degree
a literary man, that my business lay in the direction
of writing books. Consequently, it appeared that I
had better go and write one. Fery good: the next
question was — what sort of a book should I write?
And here, the reception that had been given to
"The Three Impostors" helped me greatly. I have
said that it was of the flat kind, but beyond this, it
was critical. I was told that I was merely a second-
rate imitator of Stevenson. This was not quite all
the truth, but there was a great deal of truth in it,
and I am glad to say that I took my correction in a
proper spirit. I resolved to try to amend my ways.
I made manly resolutions. As I put it to my old
friend, that distinguished American citizen, A. E.
Waite: "I will never give anybody a white powder
again" And on the whole, I have honoured that
vow ever since. I was to start afresh, then, from
the beginning, to turn over a new leaf, both as re-
gards matter and manner. No more white pow-
ders, no more of the calix principis inferorum, no
more hanky-panky with the Great God Pan, or the

vi

Introduction

Little People or any people of that dubious sort;
and — this was the hard part of it — no more of the
measured, rounded Stevensonian cadence, which I
had learned to use with some faculty and more
facility. And so we were getting on; I had at least
found out the sort of book that I was not going to
write. It merely remained to discover what sort
of book I was going to write.

I took this problem out with me on solemn walks
in dimmest Bloomsbury, then a region most fit for
the contemplations of a meditative man. I had just
moved into chambers at 4 Fernlam Buildings, Gray's
Inn, and so, by way of Theobald's Road, I had easy
access to the old, grave squares where life moved
quietly and peaceably as if it were the life of a little
country town. Grey square opened into grey square,
silent street into silent street; all was decorous and
remote from the roar of traffic and the rush of men.
But few people ascended the steps of the dim old
houses, but few descended them; the local trades-
men, all old established, old-fashioned, steady and
good, called for orders and purveyed their wares
in a sober way; Bloomsbury was silence and repose;
and in its grey calm I pursued my anxious studies,
and submitted my problems to myself.

The required notion came at last, not from
within, nor even from Bloomsbury, but from with-
out. I am not quite sure, but almost sure, that the
needed hint was discovered in an introduction to

vii

Introduction

"Tristram Shandy" written by that most accom-
plished man of letters, Mr. Charles Whibley. Mr.
Whibley, in classifying Sterne's masterpiece, noted
that it might be called a picaresque of the mind, con-
trasting it with "Gil Bias" which is a picaresque of
the body. This distinction had struck me very much
when I read it; and now as I was puzzling my head
to find a spring for the book that was to be written,
Mr. Whibley's dictum occurred to me, and applying
it to another eighteenth century masterpiece, I
asked myself why I should not write a "Robinson
Crusoe" of the soul. I resolved forthwith that I
would do so; I would take the theme of solitude,
loneliness, separation from mankind, but, in place
of a desert island and a bodily separation, my hero
should be isolated in London and find his chief
loneliness in the midst of myriads of myriads of
men. His should be a solitude of the spirit, and
the ocean surrounding him and disassociating him
from his kind should be a spiritual deep. And here
I found myself, as I thought, on sure ground; for
I had had some experience of such things. For
two years I had endured terrors of loneliness in
my little room in Clarendon road, Notting Hill Gate,
and so I was soundly instructed as to the matter of
the work. I felt, in short, that I had my notion
firmly by the tail; and so at once I set to work.

Not to writing, be it understood, but rather to
the daily consideration of my topic; to taking it

viii

Introduction

every night to bed with me as a child takes his toy;
to putting it on the breakfast table beside my morn-
ing tea, again as a child with a new toy is apt to set
it down on the cloth beside his plate of bread and
butter. The notion (and my faithful bulldog Jug-
gernaut} went with me on my dim Bloomsbury
walks on grey mornings and wintry darkening after-
noons, and when occasionally I went out and dined
with a friend, the notion was in my pocket, and
every now and then I would take it out, as it were,
and glance at it for a moment, to make quite sure
that it was safe and still there. Unnoticed, I put
a few drops of the notion in the wine and sprinkled
it lightly on the meat and found that it improved the
aroma and flavor of both enormously; and when-
ever I was a little bored or down in the mouth and
out of sorts, I took a couple of spoonfuls of the
notion and felt better at once.

And then I began to plan it out on paper, and to
try to reduce it to some logical form, to think of in-
cidents that would show forth the idea to the best
advantage, to determine the main course of the
story, and now and again to write down "bits" that
occurred to me. I proceeded in this manner for
some weeks. The precious "notion" had been given
me, let us say, toward the end of October, but it was
not till early in February that I put pen to paper in
dead earnest, and launched with a trembling heart
on the first chapter. And then the trouble began.

ix

Introduction

For, in the first place, I had vowed myself, it will
be remembered, to a change of style. Or rather, I
was to abandon the manner in which "The Three
Impostors" had been written, which was not my
manner but Stevenson's and to get a style, or some-
thing like a style, of my own. The gracious round-
ing of the sentence, the bright balance of words, the
sonorous rise and fall of the cadences were done
with; no more of costume; all was to be plain, every-
day clothes. But it was a hard struggle. The
player in private life does not want to "take the
stage" as if he were Charles Surface in bloom-col-
ored satin; but, on the other hand, he wants still less
to enter a drawing room as if he had a game leg and
a club foot: I had a horrible todo with my sen-
tences in that first chapter. The old rules were
gone, the new ones were yet to learn and most vilely
I sweated at the task of learning them. The manu-
script of that first chapter was a mass of erasures,
corrections, interlineations. But somehow it was
done, and, I thought, not so badly, all things con-
sidered. And then I started, more hopefully, at the
second chapter. And then I was done.

I have said that I had planned the book out on
paper, that I had, as it were, drawn it to scale, de-
vising and arranging a due succession of incidents
and events. And no sooner had I written two lines
of that second chapter, according to plan, than I
found that the book as planned could not be

Introduction

written at all. My clay model broke Into bits in
my hand. It had looked all right in the clay, but in
the stone it most certainly would not do. It was a
horrible moment.

For three weeks I sat down night after night with
blank paper before me. Night after night I began
to write that second chapter; night after night I
groaned and shut up my desk. Sometimes the
night's work amounted to two lines; sometimes to
two folios; but it was no good. There was neither
life, nor fire, nor movement, nor reality in a word
of it. Here was I with one chapter of the book
finished and all the rest impossible. But all the
same it was going to be done. I was as stubborn
in those days as my good bulldog, Juggernaut; and
I cannot say more than that.

And here I would say that to the best of my be-
lief, I was brought to a dead stop precisely because
I had explored the way and laid it out so thoroughly.
I have told how I rolled the "notion" up and down
and round about in my mind; how I planned and
plotted and blew up the rocks and cut away the
brushwood and felled the trees, so that there should
be no difficulties in the track; and there was the mis-
chief of it. For the truth is, that for me at any
rate literature is always an exploration. The relish
of it, the delight of it are indissolubly bound up with
the sense of penetrating into a new world and an un-
discovered region, of standing on some minor peak

xi

Introduction

in Darien and looking on worlds that no eye has
ever seen before. And this must be the sense of
the scene as the actual words are written, as the ink
flows from the pen — or else there is nothing written
that matters two straws. And in the affair of this
particular bookt I had taken such pains in explor-
ing the ground that when I came to write it, there
was nothing left to explore. Here were no
miracles, no mysteries, no buried treasures, no un-
looked for wonders. Everything was known, every-
thing familiar, and all seemed quite devoid of signifi-
cance.

Still, that book had got to be written, and was
going to be written. And one happy night the whole
matter of that famous second chapter was mani-
fested to me. As far as I remember, in the original
design, Lucian was at this point to be packed of to
London to the miseries of the inevitable garret; now
it seemed that there were further adventures for
him in his native country. I thought of these and
wrote them and so got the opportunity of dwelling
a little longer among the dear woods and the domed
hills and the memorable vales of my native Gwent,
of trying once more to set down some faint echoes
of the inexpressive song that the beloved land al-
ways sang to me and still sings across all the waste
of weary years. Then I found somewhere or other,
the recipe for the "Roman Chapter," an attempted
recreation of the Roman British world of Isca

xii

Introduction

Silurum, C 'aerie on-on-Usk, the town where I was
born, and soaked myself so thoroughly in the vision
of the old golden city — now a little desolate milage
— and listened so long in the deep green of Went-
wood for the clangour of the marching Legion and
for the noise of their trumpets that I grew quite
"dithery" as they say in some parts of England. I
would go out on my dim Bloomsbury strolls, deep in
my dream, and would "come to myself" with a sud-
den shock in Lamb's Conduit Street or Mecklen-
burgh Square or in the solitudes of Great Coram
Street, realizing certainly, that I was not, in actual-
ity, in the Garden of Avallaunins or delaying in the
Via Nympharum or on the Pons Saturni — it is called
Pont Sadwrn to this day — but utterly at a loss to
know exactly where I was or what I was doing, with-
out the faintest notion of the various positions of
north and south, east and west, and not at all clear
as to how I was to get home to Gray's Inn and my
lunch. And it was in this queer way that the fourth
chapter was accomplished. I was somewhat proud
of it, and went on gaily through Chapters Five, Six
and Seven, and had a month's holiday in Provence,
and came back to finish my book, feeling confident
and in the best of spirits.

Alas! my pride had a deep fall indeed. I read
over those last three chapters and saw suddenly that
they were all hopelessly wrong, that they would
not do at any price, that I had turned, unperceiving,

xiii

Introduction

from the straight path by ever so little, and had
gone on, getting farther and farther away from the
true direction till the way was hopelessly lost. I
was in the middle of a black wood and I could not
see any path out of it.

There was only one thing to be done. The
three condemned chapters went into the drawer and
I began over again from the end of Chapter Four.
Five and Six were done, and then again I struggled
desperately for many weeks, trying to find the last
chapter. False tracks again, hopeless efforts, spoilt
folios thick about me till by some chance or another,
I know not how, the right notion was given me, and
I wrote the seventh and last chapter in a couple of
nights. Once more the thought of the old land had
come to my help; the book was finished. It had oc-
cupied from first to last the labour of eighteen
months.

Then I began to send the manuscript round to
the publishers. The result would have melted the
heart of the sourest cynic. To those hard men of
business, as they are sometimes called, time was
nothing, kindness everything. They wrote me, one
after another, long letters in small writing on large
quarto paper. They all implored me, as I loved
them, not to publish this book because, as they ex-
plained, it was so poor and weak and dull that its
publication would ruin what little reputation I had
gained before.

xiv

Introduction

One of these good men went farther. A month
or two after he had refused "The Hill of Dreams''
on folios of in quarto kindness, I saw amongst the
"literary announcements" in some paper a para-
graph which interested me deeply. It ran some-
thing like this:

"Mr. Blank — the publisher — and Mr. Dash — an
eminent man of letters — have got hold of a promis-
ing idea for a romance. They propose, so Mr.
Blank tells me, to describe the adventures of a lad
who lives partly in the life of today and partly in the
Roman world of the second century of our era.
The plan seems a novel and arresting one and I
look forward to reading the book next spring.
The collaborators have not yet thought of a title
for what should be a striking story"

I chuckled. I knew that lad and whence he
came: from Chapter Four of my MS. However,
nothing more was heard of him in his revised and
improved form. "The Hill of Dreams" was pub-
lished in 1907, ten years after it had been finished.

The Hill
of Dreams

.... . .. . I •

THERE was a glow in the sky as if great
furnace doors were opened.
But all the afternoon his eyes had
looked on glamour; he had strayed in fairyland.
The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor
had gone out resolved to lose himself, to discover
strange hills and prospects that he had never seen
before. The air was still, breathless, exhausted
after heavy rain, and the clouds looked as if they
had been moulded of lead. No breeze blew upon
the hill, and down in the well of the valley not a
dry leaf stirred, not a bough shook in all the dark
January woods.

About a mile from the rectory he had diverged
from the main road by an opening that promised
mystery and adventure. It was an old neglected
lane, little more than a ditch, worn ten feet deep
by its winter waters, and shadowed by great un-
trimmed hedges, densely woven together. On each
side were turbid streams, and here and there a tor-
rent of water gushed down the banks, flooding
the lane. It was so deep and dark that he could not

3

The Hill of Dreams

get a glimpse of the country through which he was
passing, but the way went down and down to some
unconjectured hollow.

Perhaps he walked two miles between the high
walls of the lane before its descent ceased, but he
thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very
far, all the long way from the known to the un-
known. He had come as it were into the bottom of
a bowl amongst the hills, and black woods shut out
the world. From the road behind him, from the
road before him, from the unseen wells beneath
the trees, rivulets of waters swelled and streamed
down towards the center, to the brook that crossed
the lane. Amid the dead and wearied silence of the
air, beneath leaden and motionless clouds, it was
strange to hear such a tumult of gurgling and rush-
ing water, and he stood for a while on the quivering
footbridge and watched the rush of dead wood and
torn branches and wisps of straw all hurrying madly
past him, to plunge into the heaped spume, the
barmy froth that had gathered against a fallen
tree.

Then he climbed again, and went up between lime-
stone rocks, higher and higher, till the noise of
waters became indistinct, a faint humming like
swarming hives in summer. He walked some dis-
tance on level ground, till there was a break in
the banks and a stile on which he could lean and
look out. He found himself, as he had hoped, afar

4

The Hill of Dreams

and forlorn; he had strayed into outland and occult
territory. From the eminence of the lane, skirting
the brow of a hill, he looked down into deep valleys
and dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter
country, wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meet-
ing the grey still sky. Immediately beneath his
feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley,
a hillside of close grass patched with dead bracken,
and dotted here and there with stunted thorns, and
below there were deep oakwoods, all still and silent,
and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The
grass and bracken and thorns and woods, all were
brown and grey beneath the leaden sky; and as
Lucian looked he was amazed, as though he were
reading a wonderful story, the meaning of which
was a little greater than his understanding. Then,
like the hero of a fairy-book, he went on and on,
catching now and again glimpses of the amazing
country into which he had penetrated, and per-
ceiving rather than seeing that as the day waned
everything grew more grey and sombre. As he
advanced he heard the evening sounds of the farms,
the low of the cattle, and the barking of the sheep-
dogs; a faint thin noise from far away. It was
growing late, and as the shadows blackened he
walked faster, till once more the lane began to de-
scend, there was a sharp turn, and he found himself,
with a good deal of relief, and a little disappoint-
ment, on familiar ground. He had nearly de-

5

The Hill of Dreams

scribed a circle and knew this end of the lane very
well; it was not much more than a mile from home.
He walked smartly down the hill; the air was all
glimmering and indistinct, transmuting trees and
hedges into ghostly shapes, and the walls of the
White House farm flickered on the hillside, as if
they were moving towards him. Then a change
came. First, a little breath of wind brushed with a
dry whispering sound through the hedges, the few
leaves left on the boughs began to stir, and one or
two danced madly, and as the wind freshened and
came up from a new quarter, the sapless branches
above rattled against one another like bones. The
growing breeze seemed to clear the air and lighten
it. He was passing the stile where a path led to old
Mrs. Gibbon's desolate little cottage, in the middle
of the fields, at some distance even from the lane,
and he saw the light blue smoke of her chimney rise
distinct above the gaunt green-gage trees, against a
pale band that was broadening along the horizon.
As he passed the stile with his head bent, and his
eyes on the ground, something white started out
from the black shadow of the hedge, and in the
strange twilight, now tinged with a flush from the
west, a figure seemed to swim past him and disap-
pear. For a moment he wondered who it could be,
the light was so flickering and unsteady, so unlike the
real atmosphere of day, when he recollected it was
only Annie Morgan, old Morgan's daughter at the

6

The Hill of Dreams

White House. She was three years older than he,
and it annoyed him to find that though she was only
fifteen, there had been a dreadful increase in her
height since the summer holidays. He had got to
the bottom of the hill, and lifting up his eyes, saw
the strange changes of the sky. The pale band had
broadened into a clear vast space of light, and above,
the heavy leaden clouds were breaking apart and
driving across the heaven before the wind. He
stopped to watch, and looked up at the great mound
that jutted out from the hills into mid-valley. It
was a natural formation, and always it must have
had something of the form of a fort, but its steep-
ness had been increased by Roman art, and there
were high banks on the summit which Lucian's
father had told him were the vallum of the camp,
and a deep ditch had been dug to the north to sever
it from the hillside. On this summit oaks had
grown, queer stunted-looking trees with twisted and
contorted trunks, and writhing branches; and these
now stood out black against the lighted sky. And
then the air changed once more; the flush increased,
and a spot like blood appeared in the pond by the
gate, and all the clouds were touched with fiery
spots and dapples of flame; here and there it looked
as if awful furnace doors were being opened.

The wind blew wildly, and it came up through the
woods with a noise like a scream, and a great
oak by the roadside ground its boughs together

7

The Hill of Dreams

with a dismal grating jar. As the red gained in
the sky, the earth and all upon it glowed, even the
grey winter fields and the bare hillsides crimsoned,
the waterpools were cisterns of molten brass, and
the very road glittered. He was wonder-struck,
almost aghast, before the scarlet magic of the after-
glow. The old Roman fort was invested with fire;
flames from heaven were smitten about its walls,
and above there was a dark floating cloud, like a
fume of smoke, and every haggard writhing tree
showed as black as midnight against the blast of the
furnace.

When he got home he heard his mother's voice
calling: 'Here's Lucian at last. Mary, Master
Lucian has come, you can get the tea ready.' He
told a long tale of his adventures, and felt some-
what mortified when his father seemed perfectly
acquainted with the whole course of the lane, and
knew the names of the wild woods through which
he had passed in awe.

'You must have gone by the Darren, I sup-
pose'— that was all he said. 'Yes, I noticed the
sunset; we shall have some stormy weather. I don't
expect to see many in church to-morrow.'

There was buttered toast for tea 'because it was
holidays.' The red curtains were drawn, and a
bright fire was burning, and there was the old fa-
miliar furniture, a little shabby, but charming from
association. It was much pleasanter than the cold

8

The Hill of Dreams

and squalid schoolroom ; and much better to be read-
ing Chambers' s Journal than learning Euclid; and
better to talk to his father and mother than to be
answering such remarks as: 'I say, Taylor, I've
torn my trousers; how much do you charge for
mending?' 'Lucy, dear, come quick and sew this
button on my shirt.'

That night the storm woke him, and he groped
with his hands amongst the bedclothes, and sat
up, shuddering, not knowing where he was. He
had seen himself, in a dream, within the Roman
fort, working some dark horror, and the furnace
doors were opened and a blast of flame from heaven
was smitten upon him.

Lucian went slowly, but not discreditably, up
the school, gaining prizes now and again, and fall-
ing in love more and more with useless reading and
unlikely knowledge. He did his elegiacs and iam-
bics well enough, but he preferred exercising himself
in the rhymed Latin of the middle ages. He liked
history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid
waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pave-
ments riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on
the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest,
the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls
growing grey. The masters did not encourage these
researches; a pure enthusiasm, they felt, should be
for cricket and football, the dilettanti might even

9

The Hill of Dreams

play fives and read Shakespeare without blame, but
healthy English boys should have nothing to do with
decadent periods. He was once found guilty of
recommending Villon to a school-fellow named
Barnes. Barnes tried to extract unpleasantness
from the text during preparation, and rioted in his
place, owing to his incapacity for the language.
The matter was a serious one; the headmaster had
never heard of Villon, and the culprit gave up the
name of his literary admirer without remorse.
Hence, sorrow for Lucian, and complete immunity
for the miserable illiterate Barnes, who resolved to
confine his researches to the Old Testament, a book
which the headmaster knew well. As for Lucian,
he plodded on, learning his work decently, and some-
times doing very creditable Latin and Greek prose.
His school-fellows thought him quite mad, and toler-
ated him, and indeed were very kind to him in their
barbarous manner. He often remembered in after
life acts of generosity and good nature done by
wretches like Barnes, who had no care for old French
nor for curious metres, and such recollections al-
ways moved him to emotion. Travellers tell such
tales; cast upon cruel shores amongst savage races,
they have found no little kindness and warmth of
hospitality.

He looked forward to the holidays as joyfully
as the rest of them. Barnes and his friend Duscot
used to tell him their plans and anticipations; they

10

The Hill of Dreams

were going home to brothers and sisters, and to
cricket, more cricket, or to football, more football,
and in the winter there were parties and jollities of
all sorts. In return he would announce his intention
of studying the Hebrew language, or perhaps Prov-
engal, with a walk up a bare and desolate mountain
by way of open-air amusement, and on a rainy day
for choice. Whereupon Barnes would impart to
Duscot his confident belief that old Taylor was quite
cracked. It was a queer, funny life that of school,
so very unlike anything in Tom Brown. He once
saw the headmaster patting the head of the bishop's
little boy, while he called him 'my little man,' and
smiled hideously. He told the tale grotesquely in
the lower fifth room the same day, and earned much
applause, but forfeited all liking directly by propos-
ing a voluntary course of scholastic logic. One bar-
barian threw him to the ground and another jumped
on him, but it was done very pleasantly. There
were, indeed, some few of a worse class in the
school, solemn sycophants, prigs perfected from
tender years, who thought life already 'serious,' and
yet, as the headmaster said, were 'joyous, manly
young fellows.' Some of these dressed for din-
ner at home, and talked of dances when they
came back in January. But this virulent sort was
comparatively infrequent, and achieved great suc-
cess in after life. Taking his school days on the
whole, he always spoke up for the system, and years

II

The Hill of Dreams

afterwards he described with enthusiasm the strong
beer at a roadside tavern, some way out of the town.
But he always maintained that the taste for tobacco,
acquired in early life, was the great note of the
English Public School.

Three years after Lucian's discovery of the nar-
row lane and the vision of the flaming fort, the Aug-
ust holidays brought him home at a time of great
heat. It was one of those memorable years of
English weather, when some Provengal spell seems
wreathed round the island in the northern sea, and
the grasshoppers chirp loudly as the cicadas, the
hills smell of rosemary, and white walls of old farm-
houses blaze in the sunlight as if they stood in Aries
or Avignon or famed Tarascon by Rhone.

Lucian's father was late at the station, and con-
sequently Lucian bought the Confessions of an Eng-
lish Opium Eater which he saw on the bookstall.
When his father did drive up, Lucian noticed that
the old trap had had a new coat of dark paint, and
that the pony looked advanced in years.

4I was afraid that I should be late, Lucian,' said
his father, 'though I made old Polly go like any-
thing. I was just going to tell George to put her
into the trap when young Philip Harris came to me
in a terrible state. He said his father fell down
'all of a sudden like' in the middle of the field, and
they couldn't make him speak, and would I please
to come and see him. So I had to go, though I

12

The Hill of Dreams

couldn't do anything for the poor fellow. They
had sent for Dr. Burrows, and I am afraid he will
find it a bad case of sunstroke. The old people say
they never remember such a heat before.'

The pony jogged steadily along the burning turn-
pike road, taking revenge for the hurrying on the
way to the station. The hedges were white with
the limestone dust, and the vapour of heat palpi-
tated over the fields. Lucian showed his Confes-
sions to his father, and began to talk of the beauti-
ful bits he had already found. Mr. Taylor knew
the book well — had read it many years before. In-
deed he was almost as difficult to surprise as that
character in Daudet, who had one formula for all
the chances of life, and when he saw the drowned
Academician dragged out of the river, merely ob-
served 'J'ai vu tout qa' Mr. Taylor the parson, as
his parishioners called him, had read the fine books
and loved the hills and woods, and now knew no
more of pleasant or sensational surprises. Indeed
the living was much depreciated in value, and his
own private means were reduced almost to vanish-
ing point, and under such circumstances the great
style loses many of its finer savours. He was very
fond of Lucian, and cheered by his return, but in the
evening he would be a sad man again, with his head
resting on one hand, and eyes reproaching sorry
fortune.

Nobody called out 'Here's your master with

13

The Hill of Dreams

Master Lucian: you can get tea ready,' when the
pony jogged up to the front door. His mother had
been dead a year, and a cousin kept house. She was
a respectable person called Deacon, of middle age,
and ordinary standards; and, consequently, there
was cold mutton on the table. There was a cake,
but nothing of flour, baked in ovens, would rise at
Miss Deacon's evocation. Still, the meal was laid
in the beloved 'parlour,' with the view of hills and
valleys and climbing woods from the open window,
and the old furniture was still pleasant to see, and
the old books in the shelves had many memories.
One of the most respected of the armchairs had be-
come weak in the castors and had to be artfully
propped up, but Lucian found it very comfortable
after the hard forms. When tea was over he went
out and strolled in the garden and orchards, and
looked over the stile down into the brake, where
foxgloves and bracken and broom mingled with the
hazel undergrowth, where he knew of secret glades
and untracked recesses, deep in the woven green, the
cabinets for many years of his lonely meditations.
Every path about his home, every field and hedge-
row had dear and friendly memories for him; and
the odour of the meadowsweet was better than the
incense steaming in the sunshine. He loitered, and
hung over the stile till the far-off woods began to
turn purple, till the white mists were wreathing in
the valley.

The Hill of Dreams

Day after day, through all that August, morn-
ing and evening were wrapped in haze; day after
day the earth shimmered in the heat, and the air was
strange, unfamiliar. As he wandered in the lanes
and sauntered by the cool sweet verge of the woods,
he saw and felt that nothing was common or accus-
tomed, for the sunlight transfigured the meadows
and changed all the form of the earth. Under the
violent Provencal sun, the elms and beeches looked
exotic trees, and in the early morning when the
mists were thick the hills had put on an unearthly
shape.

The one adventure of the holidays was the visit
to the Roman fort, to that fantastic hill about whose
steep bastions and haggard oaks he had seen the
flames of sunset writhing nearly three years before.
Ever since that Saturday evening in January, the
lonely valley had been a desirable place to him; he
had watched the green battlements in summer and
winter weather, had seen the heaped mounds rising
dimly amidst the drifting rain, had marked the vio-
lent height swim up from the ice-white mists of
summer evenings, had watched the fairy bulwarks
glimmer and vanish in hovering April twilight. In
the hedge of the lane there was a gate on which he
used to lean and look down south to where the hill
surged up so suddenly, its summit defined on summer
evenings not only by the rounded ramparts but by
the ring of dense green foliage that marked the cir-

15

The Hill of Dreams

cle of oak trees. Higher up the lane, on the way
he had come that Saturday afternoon, one could
see the white walls of Morgan's farm on the hill-
side to the north, and on the south there was the
stile with the view of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage
smoke; but down in the hollow, looking over the
gate, there was no hint of human work, except those
green and antique battlements, on which the oaks
stood in circle, guarding the inner wood.

The ring of the fort drew him with stronger fas-
cination during that hot August weather. Standing,
or as his headmaster would have said, mooning
by the gate, and looking into that enclosed and
secret valley, it seemed to his fancy as if there were
a halo about the hill, an aureole that played like
flame around it. One afternoon as he gazed from
his station by the gate the sheer sides and the swell-
ing bulwarks were more than ever things of en-
chantment; the green oak ring stood out against the
sky as still and bright as in a picture, and Lucian,
in spite of his respect for the law of trespass, slid
over the gate. The farmers and their men were
busy on the uplands with the harvest, and the ad-
venture was irresistible. At first he stole along
by the brook in the shadow of the alders, where the
grass and the flowers of wet meadows grew richly;
but as he drew nearer to the fort, and its height now
rose sheer above him, he left all shelter, and begart
desperately to mount. There was not a breath of

16

The Hill of Dreams

wind; the sunlight shone down on the bare hillside;
the loud chirp of the grasshoppers was the only
sound. It was a steep ascent and grew steeper as
the valley sank away. He turned for a moment,
and looked down towards the stream which now
seemed to wind remote between the alders; above
the valley there were small dark figures moving
in the cornfield, and now and again there came the
faint echo of a high-pitched voice singing through
the air as on a wire. He was wet with heat; the
sweat streamed off his face, and he could feel it
trickling all over his body. But above him the
green bastions rose defiant, and the dark ring of
oaks promised coolness. He pressed on, and
higher, and at last began to crawl up the vallum, on
hands and knees, grasping the turf and here and
there the roots that had burst through the red
earth. And then he lay, panting with deep breaths,
on the summit.

Within the fort it was all dusky and cool and
hollow; it was as if one stood at the bottom of a
great cup. Within, the wall seemed higher than
without, and the ring of oaks curved up like a dark
green vault. There were nettles growing thick
and rank in the foss; they looked different from
the common nettles in the lanes, and Lucian, letting
his hand touch a leaf by accident, felt the sting burn
like fire. Beyond the ditch there was an under-
growth, a dense thicket -of trees, stunted and old,

17

The Hill of Dreams

crooked and withered by the winds into awkward
and ugly forms; beech and oak and hazel and ash
and yew twisted and so shortened and deformed that
each seemed, like the nettle, of no common kind.
He began to fight his way through the ugly growth,
stumbling and getting hard knocks from the re-
bound of the twisted boughs. His foot struck once
or twice against something harder than wood, and
looking down he saw stones white with the leprosy
of age, but still showing the work of the axe. And
farther, the roots of the stunted trees gripped the
foot-high relics of a wall; and a round heap of fallen
stones nourished rank, unknown herbs, that smelt
poisonous. The earth was black and unctuous, and
bubbling under the feet, left no track behind. From
it, in the darkest places where the shadow was thick-
est, swelled the growth of an abominable fungus,
making the still air sick with its corrupt odour, and
he shuddered as he felt the horrible thing pulped
beneath his feet. Then there was a gleam of sun-
light, and as he thrust the last boughs apart, he
stumbled into the open space in the heart of the
camp. It was a lawn of sweet close turf in the
centre of the matted brake, of clean firm earth from
which no shameful growth sprouted, and near the
middle of the glade was a stump of a felled yew-
tree, left untrimmed by the woodman. Lucian
thought it must have been made for a seat; a
crooked bough through which a little sap still ran

18

The Hill of Dreams

was a support for the back, and he sat down and
rested after his toil. It was not really so comfort-
able a seat as one of the school forms, but the satis-
faction was to find anything at all that would serve
for a chair. He sat there, still panting after the
climb and his struggle through the dank and jungle-
like thicket, and he felt as if he were growing hotter
and hotter; the sting of the nettle was burning his
hand, and the tingling fire seemed to spread all over
his body.

Suddenly, he knew that he was alone. Not
merely solitary; that he had often been amongst
the woods and deep in the lanes; but now it was
wholly different and a very strange sensation. He
thought of the valley winding far below him, all its
fields by the brook green and peaceful and still,
without path or track. Then he had climbed the
abrupt surge of the hill, and passing the green
and swelling battlements, the ring of oaks, and
the matted thickets, had come to the central space.
And behind there were, he knew, many desolate
fields, wild as common, untrodden, unvisited. He
was utterly alone. He still grew hotter as he sat
on the stump, and at last lay down at full length
on the soft grass, and more at his ease felt the
waves of heat pass over his body.

And then he began to dream, to let his fancies
stray over half-imagined, delicious things, indulg-
ing a virgin mind in its wanderings. The hot air

19

The Hill of Dreams

seemed to beat upon him in palpable waves, and
the nettle sting tingled and itched intolerably; and
he was alone upon the fairy hill, within the great
mounds, within the ring of oaks, deep in the heart
of the matted thicket. Slowly and timidly he be-
gan to untie his boots, fumbling with the laces, and
glancing all the while on every side at the ugly mis-
shapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not a branch
was straight, not one was free, but all were inter-
laced and grew one about another; and just above
ground, where the cankered stems joined the protu-
berant roots, there were forms that imitated the
human shape, and faces and twining limbs that
amazed him. Green mosses were hair, and tresses
were stark in grey lichen; a twisted root swelled into
a limb ; in the hollows of the rotted bark he saw the
masks of men. His eyes were fixed and fascinated
by the simulacra of the wood, and could not see his
hands, and so at last, and suddenly, it seemed, he
lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his olive skin,
dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision
of a strayed faun.

Quick flames now quivered in the substance of
his nerves, hints of mysteries, secrets of life passed
trembling through his brain, unknown desires stung
him. As he gazed across the turf and into the
thicket, the sunshine seemed really to become green,
and the contrast between the bright glow poured on
the lawn and the black shadow of the brake made an

20

The Hill of Dreams

odd flickering light, in which all the grotesque pos-
tures of stem and root began to stir; the wood was
alive. The turf beneath him heaved and sank as
with the deep swell of the sea. He fell asleep, and
lay still on the grass, in the midst of the thicket.

He found out afterwards that he must have slept
for nearly an hour. The shadows had changed
when he awoke; his senses came to him with a sud-
den shock, and he sat up and stared at his bare limbs
in stupid amazement. He huddled on his clothes
and laced his boots, wondering what folly had be-
set him. Then, while he stood indecisive, hesita-
ting, his brain a whirl of puzzled thought, his body
trembling, his hands shaking; as with electric heat,
sudden remembrance possessed him. A flaming
blush shone red on his cheeks, and glowed and
thrilled through his limbs. As he awoke, a brief
and slight breeze had stirred in a nook of the matted
boughs, and there was a glinting that might have
been the flash of sudden sunlight across shadow, and
the branches rustled and murmured for a moment,
perhaps at the wind's passage.

He stretched out his hands, and cried to his visi-
tant to return; he entreated the dark eyes that had
shone over him, and the scarlet lips that had kissed
him. And then panic fear rushed into his heart, and
he ran blindly, dashing through the wood. He
climbed the vallum, and looked out, crouching, lest
anybody should see him. Only the shadows were

21

The Hill of Dreams

changed, and a breath of cooler air mounted from
the brook; the fields were still and peaceful, the
black figures moved, far away, amidst the corn, and
the faint echo of the high-pitched voices sang thin
and distant on the evening wind. Across the
stream, in the cleft on the hill, opposite to the fort,
the blue wood smoke stole up a spiral pillar from
the chimney of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage. He be-
gan to run full tilt down the steep surge of the
hill, and never stopped till he was over the gate and
in the lane again. As he looked back, down the
valley to the south, and saw the violent ascent, the
green swelling bulwarks, and the dark ring of oaks ;
the sunlight seemed to play about the fort with an
aureole of flame.

'Where on earth have you been all this time,
Lucian,' said his cousin when he got home, 'Why,
you look quite ill. It is really madness of you to
go walking in such weather as this. I wonder you
haven't got a sunstroke. And the tea must be
nearly cold. I couldn't keep your father waiting,
you know.'

He muttered something about being rather tired,
and sat down to his tea. It was not cold, for the
'cosy' had been put over the pot, but it was black
and bitter strong, as his cousin expressed it. The
draught was unpalatable, but it did him good, and
the thought came with great consolation that he had

22

The Hill of Dreams

only been asleep and dreaming queer, nightmarish
dreams. He shook off all his fancies with resolu-
tion, and thought the loneliness of the camp, and
the burning sunlight, and possibly the nettle sting,
which still tingled most abominably, must have been
the only factors in his farrago of impossible recol-
lections. He remembered that when he had felt the
sting, he had seized a nettle with thick folds of his
handkerchief, and having twisted off a good length,
had put it in his pocket to show his father. Mr.
Taylor was almost interested when he came in from
his evening stroll about the garden and saw the
specimen.

'Where did you manage to come across that,
Lucian?' he said. 'You haven't been to Caermaen,
have you?'

'No. I got it in the Roman fort by the common.'

'Oh, the twyn. You must have been trespassing
then. Do you know what it is?'

'No. I thought it looked different from the
common nettles.'

'Yes; it's a Roman nettle — urtica pilulifera. It's
a rare plant. Burrows says it's to be found at Caer-
maen, but I was never able to come across it. I
must add it to the flora of the parish.'

Mr. Taylor had begun to compile a flora accom-
panied by a hortus siccus, but both stayed on high
shelves dusty and fragmentary. He put the speci-

23

The Hill of Dreams

men on his desk, intending to fasten it in the book,
but the maid swept it away, dry and withered, in a
day or two.

Lucian tossed and cried out in his sleep that night,
and the awakening in the morning was, in a measure,
a renewal of the awakening in the fort. But the
impression was not so strong, and in a plain room it
seemed all delirium, a phantasmagoria. He had to
go down to Caermaen in the afternoon, for Mrs.
Dixon, the vicar's wife, had 'commanded' his pres-
ence at tea. Mr. Dixon, though fat and short and
clean shaven, ruddy of face, was a safe man, with
no extreme views on anything. He 'deplored' all
extreme party convictions, and thought the great
needs of our beloved Church were conciliation,
moderation, and above all 'amolgamation' — so he
pronounced the word. Mrs. Dixon was tall, impos-
ing, splendid, well fitted for the episcopal order, with
gifts that would have shone at the palace. There
were daughters, who studied German Literature,
and thought Miss Frances Ridley Havergal wrote
poetry, but Lucian had no fear of them ; he dreaded
the boys. Everybody said they were such fine manly
fellows, such gentlemanly boys, with such a good
manner, sure to get on in the world. Lucian had
said 'Bother!' in a very violent manner when the
gracious invitation was conveyed to him, but there
was no getting out of it. Miss Deacon did her best
to make him look smart; his ties were all so disgrace-

24

The Hill of Dreams

ful that she had to supply the want with a narrow
ribbon of a sky-blue tint; and she brushed him so
long and so violently that he quite understood why a
horse sometimes bites and sometimes kicks the
groom. He set out between two and three in a
gloomy frame of mind; he knew too well what spend-
ing the afternoon with honest manly boys meant.
He found the reality more lurid than his anticipa-
tion. The boys were in the field, and the first re-
mark he heard when he got in sight of the group
was:

'Hullo, Lucian, how much for the tie?' 'Fine
tie,' another, a stranger, observed. 'You bagged it
from the kitten, didn't you?'

Then they made up a game of cricket, and he
was put in first. He was 1. b. w. in the second
over, so they all said, and had to field for the rest
of the afternoon. Arthur Dixon, who was about
his own age, forgetting all the laws of hospitality,
told him he was a beastly muff when he missed a
catch, rather a difficult catch. He missed several
catches, and it seemed as if he were always pant-
ing after balls, which, as Edward Dixon said, any
fool, even a baby could have stopped. At last the
game broke up, solely from Lucian's lack of skill,
as everybody declared. Edward Dixon, who was
thirteen, and had a swollen red face and a project-
ing eye, wanted to fight him for spoiling the game,
and the others agreed that he funked the fight in a

The Hill of Dreams

rather dirty manner. The strange boy, who was
called De Card, and was understood to be distantly
related to Lord De Carti of M'Carthytown, said
openly that the fellows at his place wouldn't stand
such a sneak for five minutes. So the afternoon
passed off very pleasantly indeed, till it was time to
go into the vicarage for weak tea, home-made cake,
and unripe plums. He got away at last. As he
went out at the gate he heard De Card's final ob-
servation:

'We like to dress well at our place. His gov-
ernor must be beastly poor to let him go about like
that. D'ye see his trousers are all ragged at heel?
Is old Taylor a gentleman?'

It had been a very gentlemanly afternoon, but
there was a certain relief when the vicarage was
far behind, and the evening smoke of the little
town, once the glorious capital of Siluria, hung haze-
like over the ragged roofs and mingled with the
river mist. He looked down from the height of
the road on the huddled horses, saw the points of
light start out suddenly from the cottages on the
hillside beyond, and gazed at the long lovely valley
fading in the twilight, till the darkness came and all
that remained was the sombre ridge of the forest.
The way was pleasant through the solemn scented
lane, with glimpses of dim country, the vague mys-
tery of night overshadowing the woods and mead-
ows. A warm wind blew gusts of odour from the

26

The Hill of Dreams

meadowsweet by the brook, now and then bee and
beetle span homeward through the air, booming a
deep note as from a great organ far away, and
from the verge of the wood came the 'who-oo, who-
oo, who-oo' of the owls, a wild strange sound that
mingled with the whirr and rattle of the night-jar,
deep in the bracken. The moon swam up through
the films of misty clouds, and hung, a golden glorious
lantern, in mid-air; and, set in the dusky hedge, the
little green fires of the glowworms appeared. He
sauntered slowly up the lane, drinking in the re-
ligion of the scene, and thinking the country by night
as mystic and wonderful as a dimly-lit cathedral.
He had quite forgotten the 'manly young fellows'
and their sports, and only wished as the land began
to shimmer and gleam in the moonlight that he knew
by some medium of words or colour how to repre-
sent the loveliness about his way.

'Had a pleasant evening, Lucian?' said his father
when he came in.

'Yes, I had a nice walk home. Oh, in the after-
noon we played cricket. I didn't care for it much.
There was a boy named De Carti there, he is stay-
ing with the Dixons. Mrs. Dixon whispered to me
when we were going in to tea, "He's a second cousin
of Lord De Card's," and she looked quite gravely
as if she were in church.'

The parson grinned grimly and lit his old pipe.

'Baron De Carti's great-grandfather was a Dub-
27

The Hill of Dreams

lin attorney,' he remarked. 'Which his name was
Jeremiah M'Carthy. His prejudiced fellow-citi-
zens called him the Unjust Steward, also the Bloody
Attorney, and I believe that "to hell with
M'Carthy" was quite a popular cry about the time
of the Union.'

Mr. Taylor was a man of very wide and irregu-
lar reading and a tenacious memory; he often used
to wonder why he had not risen in the Church. He
had once told Mr. Dixon a singular and drolatique
anecdote concerning the bishop's college days, and
he never discovered why the prelate did not bow ac-
cording to his custom when the name of Taylor was
called at the next visitation. Some people said the
reason was lighted candles, but that was impossible,
as the Reverend and Honourable Smallwood Staf-
ford, Lord Beamys's son, who had a cure of souls
in the cathedral city, was well known to burn no
end of candles, and with him the bishop was on the
best of terms. Indeed the bishop often stayed
at Coplesey (pronounced 'Copsey') Hall, Lord
Beamys's place in the west.

Lucian had mentioned the name of De Carti with
intention, and had perhaps exaggerated a little Mrs.
Dixon's respectful manner. He knew such inci-
,dents cheered his father, who could never look at
these subjects from a proper point of view, and, as
people said, sometimes made the strangest remarks
for a clergyman. This irreverent way of treating

28

The Hill of Dreams

serious things was one of the great bonds between
father and son, but it tended to increase their isola-
tion. People said they would often have liked to
ask Mr. Taylor to garden-parties, and tea-parties,
and other cheap entertainments, if only he had not
been such an extreme man and so queer. Indeed,
a year before, Mr. Taylor had gone to a garden-
party at the Castle, Caermaen, and had made such
fun of the bishop's recent address on missions to
the Portuguese, that the Gervases and Dixons and
all who heard him were quite shocked and annoyed.
And, as Mrs. Meyrick of Lanyravon observed, his
black coat was perfectly green with age; so on the
whole the Gervases did not like to invite Mr. Tay-
lor again. As for the son, nobody cared to have
him; Mrs. Dixon, as she said to her husband, really
asked him out of charity.

'I am afraid he seldom gets a real meal at home,'
she remarked, 'so I thought he would enjoy a good
wholesome tea for once in a way. But he is such an
unsatisfactory boy, he would only have one slice
of that nice plain cake, and I couldn't get him to take
more than two plums. They were really quite ripe
too, and boys are usually so fond of fruit.'

Thus Lucian was forced to spend his holidays
chiefly in his own company, and make the best
he could of the ripe peaches on the south wall of
the rectory garden. There was a certain corner
where the heat of that August seemed concen-

29

The Hill of Dreams

trated, reverberated from one wall to the other,
and here he liked to linger of mornings, when the
mists were still thick in the valleys, 'mooning,'
meditating, extending his walk from the quince to
the medlar and back again, beside the moulder-
ing walls of mellowed brick. He was full of a
certain wonder and awe, not unmixed with a swell
of strange exultation, and wished more and more
to be alone, to think over that wonderful after-
noon within the fort. In spite of himself the im-
pression was fading; he could not understand that
feeling of mad panic terror that drove him through
the thicket and down the steep hillside; yet, he had
experienced so clearly the physical shame and reluc-
tance of the flesh; he recollected that for a few
seconds after his awakening the sight of his own
body had made him shudder and writhe as if it had
suffered some profoundest degradation. He saw
before him a vision of two forms; a faun with tin-
gling and pricking flesh lay expectant in the sun-
light, and there was also the likeness of a miserable
shamed boy, standing with trembling body and shak-
ing, unsteady hands. It was all confused, a pro-
cession of blurred images, now of rapture and ec-
stasy, and now of terror and shame, floating in a
light that was altogether phantasmal and unreal.
He dared not approach the fort again; he lingered
in the road to Caermaen that passed behind it, but
a mile away, and separated by the wild land and

30

The Hill of Dreams

a strip of wood from the towering battlements.
Here he was looking over a gate one day, doubtful
and wondering, when he heard a heavy step behind
him, and glancing round quickly saw it was old
Morgan of the White House.

'Good afternoon, Master Lucian,' he began.
'Mr. Taylor pretty well, I suppose? I be goin'
to the house a minute; the men in the fields are
wantin' some more cider. Would you come and
taste a drop of cider, Master Lucian? It's very
good, sir, indeed.'

Lucian did not want any cider, but he thought
it would please old Morgan if he took some, so he
said he should like to taste the cider very much
indeed. Morgan was a sturdy, thick-set old man
of the ancient stock; a stiff churchman, who break-
fasted regularly on fat broth and Caerphilly cheese
in the fashion of his ancestors; hot, spiced elder
wine was for winter nights, and gin for festal
seasons. The farm had always been the freehold
of the family, and when Lucian, in the wake of the
yeoman, passed through the deep porch by the
oaken door, down into the long dark kitchen, he felt
as though the seventeenth century still lingered on.
One mullioned window, set deep in the sloping wall,
gave all the light there was through quarries of
thick glass in which there were whorls and circles, so
that the lapping rose-branch and the garden and
the fields beyond were distorted to the sight. Two

31

The Hill of Dreams

heavy beams, oaken but whitewashed, ran across the
ceiling; a little glow of fire sparkled in the great fire-
place, and a curl of blue smoke fled up the cavern
of the chimney. Here was the genuine chimney-
corner of our fathers; there were seats on each side
of the fireplace where one could sit snug and shel-
tered on December nights, warm and merry in the
blazing light, and listen to the battle of the storm,
and hear the flame spit and hiss at the falling snow-
flakes. At the back of the fire were great black-
ened tiles with raised initials and a date — I. M.,
1684.

'Sit down, Master Lucian, sit down, sir,' said
Morgan.

'Annie,' he called through one of the numerous
doors, 'here's Master Lucian, the parson, would
like a drop of cider. Fetch a jug, will you, di-
rectly?'

'Very well, father,' came the voice from the dairy,
and presently the girl entered, wiping the jug she
held. In his boyish way Lucian had been a good
deal disturbed by Annie Morgan ; he could see her
on Sundays from his seat in church, and her skin,
curiously pale, her lips that seemed as though they
were stained with some brilliant pigment, her black
hair, and the quivering black eyes, gave him odd
fancies which he had hardly shaped to himself.
Annie had grown into a woman in three years, and

32

The Hill of Dreams

he was still a boy. She came into the kitchen, curt-
sying and smiling.

'Good-day, Master Lucian, and how is Mr. Tay-
lor, sir? *

'Pretty well, thank you. I hope you are well/

'Nicely, sir, thank you. How nice your voice
do sound in church, Master Lucian, to be sure. I
was telling father about it last Sunday.'

Lucian grinned and felt uncomfortable, and the
girl set down the jug on the round table and brought
a glass from the dresser. She bent close over him
as she poured out the green oily cider, fragrant of
the orchard; her hand touched his shoulder for a
moment, and she said, 'I beg your pardon, sir,' very
prettily. He looked up eagerly at her face; the
black eyes, a little oval in shape, were shining, and
the lips smiled. Annie wore a plain dress of some
black stuff, open at the throat; her skin was beauti-
ful. For a moment the ghost of a fancy hovered
unsubstantial in his mind; and then Annie curtsied as
she handed him the cider, and replied to his thanks
with, 'And welcome kindly, sir.'

The drink was really good; not thin, nor sweet,
but round and full and generous, with a fine yellow
flame twinkling through the green when one held it
up to the light. It was like a stray sunbeam hover-
ing on the grass in a deep orchard, and he swal-
lowed the glassful with relish, and had some more,

33

The Hill of Dreams

warmly commending it. Mr. Morgan was touched.

'I see you do know a good thing, sir,' he said.
'Iss, indeed, now, it's good stuff though it's my own
makin'. My old grandfather he planted the trees
in the time of the wars, and he was a very good
judge of an apple in his day and generation. And
a famous grafter he was, to be sure. You will never
see no swelling in the trees he grafted at all what-
ever. Now there's James Morris, Penyrhaul, he's
a famous grafter, too, and yet them Redstreaks he
grafted for me five year ago, they be all swollen-
like below the graft already. Would you like to
taste a Blemmin pippin, now, Master Lucian? there
be a few left in the loft, I believe.'

Lucian said he should like an apple very much and
the farmer went out by another door, and Annie
stayed in the kitchen talking. She said Mrs. Tre-
vor, her married sister, was coming to them soon to
spend a few days.

'She's got such a beautiful baby,' said Annie, 'and
he's quite sensible-like already, though he's only
nine months old. Mary would like to see you, sir,
if you would be so kind as to step in; that is, if it's
not troubling you at all, Master Lucian. I suppose
you must be getting a fine scholar now, sir?'

'I am doing pretty well, thank you,' said the boy.
'I was first in my form last term.'

'Fancy ! To think of that ! D'you hear, father,
what a scholar Master Lucian be getting?'

34

The Hill of Dreams

'He be a rare grammarian, I'm sure,' said the
farmer. 'You do take after your father, sir; I al-
ways do say that nobody have got such a good
deliverance in the pulpit.'

Lucian did not find the Blenheim Orange as good
as the cider but he ate it with all the appearance
of relish, and put another, with thanks, into his
pocket. He thanked the farmer again when he
got up to go; and Annie curtsied and smiled, and
wished him good-day, and welcome, kindly.

Lucian heard her saying to her father as he went
out what a nice-mannered young gentleman he was
getting, to be sure; and he went on his way, think-
ing that Annie was really very pretty, and speculat-
ing as to whether he would have the courage to kiss
her, if they met in a dark lane. He was quite sure
she would only laugh, and say, 'Oh, Master Lucian !'

For many months he had occasional fits of recol-
lection, both cold and hot; but the bridge of time
gradually lengthening, made those dreadful and de-
licious images grow more and more indistinct, till
at last they all passed into that wonderland which
a youth looks back upon in amazement, not knowing
why this used to be a symbol of terror or that of
joy. At the end of each term he would come home
and find his father a little more despondent, and
harder to cheer even for a moment; and the wall
paper and the furniture grew more and more dingy
and shabby. The two cats, loved and ancient

35

The Hill of Dreams

beasts, that he remembered when he was quite a
little boy, before he went to school, died miserably,
one after the other. Old Polly, the pony, at last
fell down in the stable from the weakness of old
age, and had to be killed there; the battered old
trap ran no longer along the well remembered lanes.
There was long meadow grass on the lawn, and the
trained fruit trees on the wall had got quite out of
hand. At last, when Lucian was seventeen, his
father was obliged to take him from school; he
could no longer afford the fees. This was the sorry
ending of many hopes, and dreams of a double-
first, a fellowship, distinction and glory that the poor
parson had long entertained for his son, and the
two moped together, in the shabby room, one on
each side of the sulky fire, thinking of dead days
and finished plans, and seeing a grey future in the
years that advanced towards them. At one time
there seemed some chance of a distant relative com-
ing forward to Lucian's assistance; and indeed it
was quite settled that he should go up to London
with certain definite aims. Mr. Taylor told the
good news to his acquaintances — his coat was too
green now for any pretence of friendship; and Lu-
cian himself spoke of his plans to Burrows the doc-
tor and Mr. Dixon, and one or two others. Then
the whole scheme fell through, and the parson and
his son suffered much sympathy. People, of course,
had to say they were sorry, but in reality the news

36

The Hill of Dreams

was received with high spirits, with the joy with
which one sees a stone, as it rolls down a steep place,
give yet another bounding leap towards the pool
beneath. Mrs. Dixon heard the pleasant tidings
from Mrs. Colley, who came in to talk about the
Mothers' Meeting and the Band of Hope. Mrs.
Dixon was nursing little ^Ethelwig, or some such
name, at the time, and made many affecting ob-
servations on the general righteousness with which
the world was governed. Indeed, poor Lucian's
disappointment seemed distinctly to increase her
faith in the Divine Order, as if it had been some
example in Butler's Analogy.

'Aren't Mr. Taylor's views very extreme?' she
said to her husband the same evening.

'I am afraid they are,' he replied. 'I was quite
grieved at the last Diocesan Conference at the
way in which he spoke. The dear old bishop had
given an address on Auricular Confession; he was
forced to do so, you know, after what had happened,
and I must say that I never felt prouder of our be-
loved Church.'

Mr. Dixon told all the Homeric story of the
conference, reciting the achievements of the cham-
pions, 'deploring' this and applauding that. It
seemed that Mr. Taylor had had the audacity to
quote authorities which the bishop could not very
well repudiate, though they were directly opposed
to the 'safe' episcopal pronouncement.

37

The Hill of Dreams

Mrs. Dixon of course was grieved; it was 'sad'
to think of a clergyman behaving so shamefully.

'But you know, dear,' she proceeded, 'I have
been thinking about that unfortunate Taylor boy
and his disappointments, and after what you've
just told me, I am sure it's some kind of judgment on
them both. Has Mr. Taylor forgotten the vows
he took at his ordination? But don't you think,
dear, I am right, and that he has been punished:
"The sins of the fathers"?'

Somehow or other Lucian divined this atmos-
phere of threatenings and judgments, and shrank
more and more from the small society of the coun-
tryside. For his part, when he was not 'mooning'
in the beloved fields and woods of happy memory,
he shut himself up with books, reading whatever
could be found on the shelves, and amassing a store
of incongruous and obsolete knowledge. Long did
he linger with the men of the seventeenth century;
delaying in the gay sunlit streets with Pepys, and
listening to the charmed sound of the Restoration
Revel; roaming by peaceful streams with Izaak
Walton, and the great Catholic divines; enchanted
with the portrait of Herbert the loving ascetic; awed
by the mystic breath of Crashaw. Then the cava-
lier poets sang their gallant songs; and Herrick
made Dean Prior magic ground by the holy incanta-
tion of a verse. And in the old proverbs and
homely sayings of the time he found the good and

38

The Hill of Dreams

beautiful English life, a time full of grace and dig-
nity and rich merriment. He dived deeper and
deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence
to be his province; in his disgust at the stupid usual
questions, 'Will it pay?' 'What good is it?' and so
forth, he would only read what was uncouth and
useless. The strange pomp and symbolism of the
Cabala, with its hint of more terrible things; the
Rosicrucian mysteries of Fludd, the enigmas of
Yaughan, dreams of alchemists — all these were his
delight. Such were his companions, with the hills
and hanging woods, the brooks and lonely water-
pools; books, the thoughts of books, the stirrings
of imagination, all fused into one phantasy by the
magic of the outland country. He held himself
aloof from the walls of the fort; he was content to
see the heaped mounds, the violent height with faery
bulwarks, from the gate in the lane, and to leave all
within the ring of oaks in the mystery of his boy-
hood's vision. He professed to laugh at himself
and at his fancies of that hot August afternoon,
when sleep came to him within the thicket, but in his
heart of hearts there was something that never
faded — something that glowed like the red glint of
a gypsy's fire seen from afar across the hills and
mists of the night, and known to be burning in a
wild land. Sometimes, when he was sunken in his
books, the flame of delight shot up, and showed him
a whole province and continent of his nature, all

39

The Hill of Dreams

shining and aglow; and in the midst of the exulta-
tion and triumph he would draw back a little afraid.
He had become ascetic in his studious and melan-
choly isolation, and the vision of such ecstacies
frightened him. He began to write a little; at first
very tentatively and feebly, and then with more con-
fidence. He showed some of his verses to his
father, who told him with a sigh that he had once
hoped to write — in the old days at Oxford, he
added.

'They are very nicely done,' said the parson;
'but I'm afraid you won't find anybody to print
them, my boy.'

So he pottered on; reading everything, imitating
what struck his fancy, attempting the effect of the
classic metres in English verse, trying his hand at
a masque, a Restoration comedy, forming impossible
plans for books which rarely got beyond half a
dozen lines on a sheet of paper; beset with splendid
fancies which refused to abide before the pen. But
the vain joy of conception was not altogether vain,
for it gave him some armour about his heart.

The months went by, monotonous, and sometimes
blotted with despair. He wrote and planned and
filled the waste-paper basket with hopeless efforts.
Now and then he sent verses or prose articles to
magazines, in pathetic ignorance of the trade. He
felt the immense difficulty of the career of literature
without clearly understanding it; the battle was

40

The Hill of Dreams

happily in a mist, so that the host of the enemy,
terribly arrayed, was to some extent hidden. Yet
there was enough of difficulty to appal; from fol-
lowing the intricate course of little nameless books,
from hushed twilight woods, from the vision of the
mountains, and the breath of the great wind, pass-
ing from deep to deep, he would come home filled
with thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which
he yearned to translate into the written word. And
the result of the effort seemed always to be bathos !
Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, ob-
scurity, and awkwardness clogged the pen ; it seemed
impossible to win the great secret of language; the
stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished
away in clearer light. The periods of despair were
often long and heavy, the victories very few and
trifling; night after night he sat writing after his
father had knocked out his last pipe, filling a page
with difficulty in an hour, and usually forced to
thrust the stuff away in despair, and go unhappily to
bed, conscious that after all his labour he had done
nothing. And these were moments when the ac-
customed vision of the land alarmed him, and the
wild domed hills and darkling woods seemed symbols
of some terrible secret in the inner life of that
stranger — himself. Sometimes when he was deep
in his books and papers, sometimes on a lonely walk,
sometimes amidst the tiresome chatter of Caermaen
'society,' he would thrill with a sudden sense of

41

The Hill of Dreams

awful hidden things, and there ran that quivering
flame through his nerves that brought back the rec-
ollection of the matted thicket, and that earlier
appearance of the bare black boughs enwrapped with
flames. Indeed, though he avoided the solitary
lane, and the sight of the sheer height, with its
ring of oaks and moulded mounds, the image of it
grew more intense as the symbol of certain hints
and suggestions. The exultant and insurgent flesh
seemed to have its temple and castle within those
olden walls, and he longed with all his heart to
escape, to set himself free in the wilderness of Lon-
don, and to be secure amidst the murmur of modern
streets.

II

LUCIAN was growing really anxious about
his manuscript. He had gained enough ex-
perience at twenty-three to know that edi-
tors and publishers must not be hurried; but his
book had been lying at Messrs. Beit's office for
more than three months. For six weeks he had not
dared to expect an answer, but afterwards life had
become agonising. Every morning, at post-time,
the poor wretch nearly choked with anxiety to know
whether his sentence had arrived, and the rest of
the day was racked with alternate pangs of hope and
despair. Now and then he was almost assured of
success; coming over these painful and eager pages
in memory, he found parts that were admirable,
while again, his inexperience reproached him, and
he feared he had written a raw and awkward book,
wholly unfit for print. Then he would compare
what he remembered of it with notable magazine
articles and! books praised by reviewers, and fancy
that after all there might be good points in the
thing; he could not help liking the first chapter for
instance. Perhaps the letter might come to-morrow.
So it went on; week after week of sick torture made
more exquisite by such gleams of hope; it was as if

43

The Hill of Dreams

he were stretched in anguish on the rack, and the
pain relaxed and kind words spoken now and again
by the tormentors, and then once more the grind-
ing pang and burning agony. At last he could bear
suspense no longer, and he wrote to Messrs. Beit,
inquiring in a humble manner whether the manu-
script had arrived in safety. The firm replied in a
very polite letter, expressing their regret that their
reader had been suffering from a cold in the head,
and had therefore been unable to send in his report.
A final decision was promised in a week's time, and
the letter ended with apologies 'for the delay and a
hope that he had suffered no inconvenience. Of
course the 'final decision' did not come at the end
of the week, but the book was returned at the end
of three weeks, with a circular thanking the author
for his kindness in submitting the manuscript, and
regretting that the firm did not see their way to
producing it. He felt relieved; the operation that
he had dreaded and deprecated for so long was at
last over, and he would no longer grow sick of
mornings when the letters were brought in. He
took his parcel to the sunny corner of the garden,
where the old wooden seat stood sheltered from the
biting March winds. Messrs. Beit had put in with
the circular one of their short lists, a neat booklet,
headed: Messrs. Beit & Co.'s Recent Publications.
He settled himself comfortably on the seat, lit
his pipe, and began to read: 'A Bad Un to Beat:

44

The Hill of Dreams

a Novel of Sporting Life, by the honourable Mrs.
Scudamore Runnymede, author of Yoicks, With the
Mudshire Pack, The Sportleigh Stables, etc., etc., 3
vols. At all Libraries.' The Press, it seemed,
pronounced this to be 'a charming book. Mrs.
Runnymede has wit and humour enough to furnish
forth half-a-dozen ordinary sporting novels.'
'Told with the sparkle and vivacity of a past-mis-
tress in the art of novel writing,' said the Review;
while Miranda, of Smart Society, positively bubbled
with enthusiasm. 'You must forgive me, Aminta,'
wrote this young person, 'if I have not sent the
description I promised of Madame Lulu's new crea-
tions and others of that ilk. I must a tale unfold;
Tom came in yesterday and began to rave about the
Honourable Mrs. Scudamore Runnymede's last
novel, A Bad Un to Beat. He says all the Smart
Set are talking of it, and it seems the police have
to regulate the crowd at Mudie's. You know I
read everything Mrs. Runnymede writes, so I sent
out Miggs directly to beg, borrow or steal a copy,
and I confess I burnt the midnight oil before I laid
it down. Now, mind, you get it, you will find it
so awfully chic.' Nearly all the novelists on
Messrs. Beit's list were ladies, their works all ran
to three volumes, and all of them pleased the Press,
the Review, and Miranda of Smart Society. One
of these books, Millicent's Marriage, by Sarah Pock-
lington Sanders, was pronounced fit to lie on the

45

The Hill of Dreams

schoolroom table, on the drawing-room bookshelf,
or beneath the pillow of the most gently nurtured
of our daughters. 'This,' the reviewer went on,
'is high praise, especially in these days when we are
deafened by the loud-voiced clamour of self-styled
"artists." We would warn the young men who
prate so persistently of style and literature, con-
struction and prose harmonies, that we believe the
English reading public will have none of them.
Harmless amusement, a gentle flow of domestic
interest, a faithful reproduction of the open and
manly life of the hunting field, pictures of innocent
and healthy English girlhood such as Miss Sanders
here affords us ; these are the topics that will always
find a welcome in our homes, which remain bolted
and barred against the abandoned artist and the
scrofulous stylist.'

He turned over the pages of the little book
and chuckled in high relish ; he discovered an honest
enthusiasm, a determination to strike a blow for
the good and true that refreshed and exhilarated.
A beaming face, spectacled and whiskered probably,
an expansive waistcoat, and a tender heart, seemed
to shine through the words which Messrs. Beit had
quoted; and the alliteration of the final sentence;
that was good too; there was style for you if you
wanted it. The champion of the blushing cheek
and the gushing eye showed that he too could handle
the weapons of the enemy if he cared to trouble

46

The Hill of Dreams

himself with such things. Lucian leant back and
roared with indecent laughter till the tabby torn'
cat who had succeeded to the poor dead beasts
looked up reproachfully from his sunny corner,
with a face like the reviewer's, innocent and round
and whiskered. At last he turned to his parcel and
drew out some half-dozen sheets of manuscript,
and began to read in a rather desponding spirit;
it was pretty obvious, he thought, that the stuff
was poor and beneath the standard of publication.
The book had taken a year and a half in the mak-
ing; it was a pious attempt to translate into English
prose the form and mystery of the domed hills, the
magic of occult valleys, the sound of the red swollen
brook swirling through leafless woods. Day-dreams
and toil at nights had gone into the eager pages,
he had laboured hard to do his very best, writing
and rewriting, weighing his cadences, beginning over
and over again, grudging no patience, no trouble
if only it might be pretty good; good enough to print
and sell to a reading public which had become
critical. He glanced through the manuscript in
his hand, and to his astonishment, he could not
help thinking that in its measure it was decent work.
After three months his prose seemed fresh and
strange as if it had been wrought by another man,
and in spite of himself he found charming things,
and impressions that were not commonplace. He
knew how weak it all was compared with his own

47

' The Hill of Dreams

conceptions; he had seen an enchanted city, awful,
glorious, with flame smitten about its battlements,
like the cities of the Sangraal, and he had moulded
his copy in such poor clay as came to his hand;
yet, in spite of the gulf that yawned between the
idea and the work, he knew as he read that the
thing accomplished was very far from failure. He
put back the leaves carefully, and glanced again
at Messrs. Beit's list. It had escaped his notice
that A Bad Un to Beat was in its third three-
volume edition. It was a great thing, at all events,
to know in what direction to aim, if he wished
to succeed. If he worked hard, he thought, he
might some day win the approval of the coy and
retiring Miranda of Smart Society; that modest
maiden might in his praise interrupt her task of
disinterested advertisement, her philanthropic coun-
sels to 'go to Jumper's, and mind you ask for Mr.
C. Jumper, who will show you the lovely blue pa-
per with the yellow spots at ten shillings the piece.'
He put down the pamphlet, and laughed again at
the books and the reviewers: so that he might not
weep. This then was English fiction, this was
English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an
ill-played tragedy.

The rejected manuscript was hidden away, and
his father quoted Horace's maxim as to the benefit
of keeping literary works some time 'in the wood.'
There was nothing to grumble at, though Lucian

The Hill of Dreams

was inclined to think the duration of the reader's
catarrh a little exaggerated. But this was a trifle;
he did not arrogate to himself the position of a
small commercial traveller, who expects prompt
civility as a matter of course, and not at all as a
favour. He simply forgot his old book, and re-
solved that he would make a better one if he could.
With the hot fit of resolution, the determination
not to be snuffed out by one refusal upon him, he
began to beat about in his mind for some new
scheme. At first it seemed that he had hit upon
a promising subject; he began to plot out chapters
and scribble hints for the curious story that had
entered his mind, arranging his circumstances and
noting the effects to be produced with all the enthu-
siasm of the artist. But after the first breath the'
aspect of the work changed; page after page was
tossed aside as hopeless, the beautiful sentences he
had dreamed of refused to be written, and his
puppets remained stiff and wooden, devoid of life
or motion. Then all the old despair came back,
the agonies of the artificer who strives and per-
severes in vain; the scheme that seemed of amorous
fire turned to cold hard ice in his hands. He let the
pen drop from his fingers, and wondered how he
could have ever dreamed of writing books. Again,
the thought occurred that he might do something
if he could only get away, and join the sad pro-
cession in the murmuring London streets, far from

49

The Hill of Dreams

the shadow of those awful hills. But it was
quite impossible ; the relative who had once promised
assistance was appealed to, and wrote expressing
his regret that Lucian had turned out a 'loafer,'
wasting his time in scribbling, instead of trying to
earn his living. Lucian felt rather hurt at this
letter, but the parson only grinned grimly as usual.
He was thinking of how he signed a cheque many
years before, in the days of his prosperity, and
the cheque was payable to the didactic relative,
then in but a poor way, and of a thankful turn of
mind.

The old rejected manuscript had almost passed
out of his recollection. It was recalled oddly
enough. He was looking over the Reader, and
enjoying the admirable literary criticisms, some
three months after the return of his book, when
his eye was attracted by a quoted passage in one
of the notices. The thought and style both
wakened memory, the cadences were familiar and
beloved. He read through the review from the
beginning; it was a very favourable one, and pro-
nounced the volume an immense advance on Mr.
Ritson's previous work. 'Here, undoubtedly, the
author has discovered a vein of pure metal,' the
reviewer added, 'and we predict that he will go
far.' Lucian had not yet reached his father's
stage, he was unable to grin in the manner of that
irreverent parson. The passage selected for high

50

The Hill of Dreams

praise was taken almost word for word from the
manuscript now resting in his room, the work that
had not reached the high standard of Messrs.
Beit & Co., who, curiously enough, were the pub-
lishers of the book reviewed in the Reader. He
had a few shillings in his possession, and wrote at
once to a bookseller in London for a copy of The
Chorus in Green, as the author had oddly named
the book. He wrote on June 2ist, and thought
he might fairly expect to receive the interesting
volume by the 24th; but the postman, true to his
traditions, brought nothing for him, and in the
afternoon he resolved to walk down to Caermaen,
in case it might have come by a second post; or
it might have been mislaid at the office; they for-
got parcels sometimes, especially when the bag was
heavy and the weather hot.

This 24th was a sultry and oppressive day; a grey
veil of cloud obscured the sky, and a vaporous mist
hung heavily over the land, and fumed up from the
valleys. But at five o'clock, when he started, the
clouds began to break, and the sunlight suddenly
streamed down through the misty air, making ways
and channels of rich glory, and bright islands in the
gloom. It was a pleasant and shining evening
when, passing by devious back streets to avoid the
barbarians (as he very rudely called the respectable
inhabitants of the town), he reached the post-office;
which was also the general shop.

51

The Hill of Dreams

'Yes, Mr. Taylor, there is something for you,
sir,' said the man. 'William the postman forgot
to take it up this morning,' and he handed over
the packet. Lucian took it under his arm and
went slowly through the ragged winding lanes
till he came into the country. He got over the
first stile on the road, and sitting down in the
shelter of a hedge, cut the strings and opened the
parcel. The Chorus in Green was got up in what
reviewers call a dainty manner: a bronze-green
cloth, well-cut gold lettering, wide margins and
black 'old-face' type, all witnessed to the good
taste of Messrs. Beit & Co. He cut the pages
hastily and began to read. He soon found that
he had wronged Mr. Ritson — that old literary hand
had by no means stolen his book wholesale, as
he had expected. There were about two hundred
pages in the pretty little volume, and of these about
ninety were Lucian's, dovetailed into a rather dif-
ferent scheme with skill that was nothing short of
exquisite. And Mr. Ritson's own work was often
very good; spoilt here and there for some tastes
by the 'cataloguing' method, a somewhat material-
istic way of taking an inventory of the holy country
things; but, for that very reason, contrasting to
great advantage with Lucian's hints and dreams and
note of haunting. And here and there Mr. Ritson
had made little alterations in the style of the pass-
ages he had conveyed, and most of these alterations

52

The Hill of Dreams

were amendments, as Lucian was obliged to con-
fess, though he would have liked to argue one or
two points with his collaborator and corrector. He
lit his pipe and leant back comfortably in the hedge,
thinking things over, weighing very coolly his expe-
rience of humanity, his contract with the 'society'
of the countryside, the affair of The Chorus in
Green, and even some little incidents that had struck
him as he was walking through the streets of Caer-
maen that evening. At the post-office, when he was
inquiring for his parcel, he had heard two old women
grumbling in the street; it seemed, so far as he
could make out, that both had been disappointed
in much the same way. Each had applied for an
alms at the vicarage; they were probably shiftless
old wretches who had liked beer for supper all
their lives, and had forgotten the duties of econ-
omy and 'laying up treasure upon earth.' One
was a Roman Catholic, hardened, and beyond the
reach of conversion; she had been advised to ask
alms of the priests, 'who are always creeping and
crawling about.' The other old sinner was a dis-
senter, and, 'Mr. Dixon has quite enough to do
to relieve good Church people.' Mrs. Dixon, as-
sisted by Henrietta, was, it seemed, the lady high
almoner, who dispensed these charities. As she
said to Mrs. Colley, they would end by keeping
all the beggars in the county, and they really
couldn't afford it. A large family was an expensive

53

The Hill of Dreams

thing, and the girls must have new frocks. 'Mr.
Dixon is always telling me and the girls that we must
not demoralise the people by indiscriminate charity.'
Lucian had heard of these sage counsels, and
thought of them as he listened to the bitter com-
plaints of the gaunt, hungry old women. In the
back street by which he passed out of the town
he saw a large 'healthy' boy kicking a sick cat;
the poor creature had just strength enough to crawl
under an outhouse door; probably to die in tor-
ments. He did not find much satisfaction in thrash-
ing the boy, but he did it with hearty good will.
Further on, at the corner where the turnpike used
to be, was a big notice, announcing a meeting at
the schoolroom in aid of the mission to the Portu-
guese. 'Under the patronage of the Lord Bishop
of the Diocese,' was the imposing headline; the
Reverend Merivale Dixon, vicar of Caermaen, was
to be in the chair, supported by Stanley Gervase,
Esq., J. P., and by many of the clergy and gentry
of the neighbourhood. Senhor Diabo, 'formerly
a Rormanist priest, now an evangelist in Lisbon,'
would address the meeting, 'Funds are urgently
needed to carry on this good work,' concluded the
notice. So he lay well back in the shade of the
hedge, and thought whether some sort of an article
could not be made by vindicating the terrible
Yahoos; one might point out that they were in
many respects a simple and unsophisticated race,

54

The Hill of Dreams

whose faults were the result of their enslaved posi-
tion, while such virtues as they had were all their
own. They might be compared, he thought, much
to their advantage, with more complex civilisations.
There was no hint of anything like the Beit system
of publishing as in existence amongst them, the
great Yahoo nation would surely never feed and
encourage a scabby Houyhnhnm, expelled for his
foulness from the horse-community, and the witty
dean, in all his minuteness, had said nothing of
'safe' Yahoos. On reflection, however, he did
not feel quite secure of this part of his defence;
he remembered that the leading brutes had favour-
ites, who were employed in certain simple domestic
offices about their masters; and it seemed doubtful
whether the contemplated vindication would not
break down on this point. He smiled queerly to
himself as he thought of these comparisons, but his
heart burnt with a dull fury. Throwing back his
unhappy memory, he recalled all the contempt and
scorn he had suffered; as a boy he had heard the
masters murmuring their disdain of him and of his
desire to learn other than ordinary school work.
As a young man he had suffered the insolence of
these wretched people about him; their cackling
laughter at his poverty jarred and grated in his
ears, he saw the acrid grin of some miserable idiot
woman, some creature beneath the swine in intelli-
gence and manners, merciless, as he went by with his

55

The Hill of Dreams

eyes on the dust, in his ragged clothes. He and
his father seemed to pass down an avenue of jeers
and contempt, and contempt from such animals as
these! This putrid filth, moulded into human
shape, made only to fawn on the rich and beslaver
them, thinking no foulness too foul if it were done
in honour of those in power and authority; and
no refined cruelty of contempt too cruel if it were
contempt of the poor and humble and oppressed;
it was to this obscene and ghastly throng that he
was something to be pointed at. And these men
and women spoke of sacred things, and knelt before
the awful altar of God, before the altar of
tremendous fire, surrounded as they professed by
Angels and Archangels and all the Company of
Heaven; and in their very church they had one
aisle for the rich and another for the poor. And
the species was not peculiar to Caermaen; the rich
business men in London and the successful brother
author were probably amusing themselves at the
expense of the poor struggling creature they had
injured and wounded; just as the 'healthy' boy
had burst into a great laugh when the miserable
sick cat cried out in bitter agony, and trailed its
limbs slowly, as it crept away to die. Lucian looked
into his own life and his own will; he saw that in
spite of his follies, and his want of success, he
had not been consciously malignant, he had never
deliberately aided in oppression, or looked on it

The Hill of Dreams

with enjoyment and approval, and he felt that when
he lay dead beneath the earth, eaten by swarming
worms, he would be in a purer company than now,
when he lived amongst human creatures. And he
was to call this loathsome beast, all sting and filth,
brother! 'I had rather call the devils my
brothers,' he said in his heart, 'I would fare
better in hell.' Blood was in his eyes, and as he
looked up the sky seemed of blood, and the earth
burnt with fire.

The sun was sinking low on the mountain when
he set out on the way again. Burrows, the doctor,
coming home in his trap, met him a little lower on
the road, and gave him a friendly good-night.

'A long way round on this road, isn't it?' said
the doctor. 'As you have come so far, why don't
you try the short cut across the fields? You will
find it easily enough; second stile on the left hand,
and then go straight ahead.'

He thanked Dr. Burrows and said he would
try the short cut, and Burrows span on home-
ward. He was a gruff and honest bachelor, and
often felt very sorry for the lad, and wished he
could help him. As he drove on, it suddenly oc-
curred to him that Lucian had an awful look on
his face, and he was sorry he had not asked him
to jump in, and come to supper. A hearty slice
of beef, with strong ale, whisky and soda after-
wards, a good pipe, and certain Rabelaisian tales

57

The Hill of Dreams

which the doctor had treasured for many years,
would have done the poor fellow a lot of good,
he was certain. He half turned round on his seat,
and looked to see if Lucian were still in sight, but
he had passed the corner, and the doctor drove on,
shivering a little; the mists were beginning to rise
from the wet banks of the river.

Lucian trailed slowly along the road, keeping a
look out for the stile the doctor had mentioned.
It would be a little of an adventure, he thought,
to find his way by an unknown track; he knew
the direction in which his home lay and he imagined
he would not have much difficulty in crossing from
one stile to another. The path led him up a steep
bare field, and when he was at the top, the town
and the valley winding up to the north stretched
before him. The river was stilled at the flood, and
the yellow water, reflecting the sunset, glowed in its
deep pools like dull brass. These burning pools,
the level meadows fringed with shuddering reeds,
the long dark sweep of the forest on the hill, were
all clear and distinct, yet the light seemed to have
clothed them with a new garment, even as voices
from the streets of Caermaen sounded strangely,
mounting up thin with the smoke. There beneath
him lay the huddled cluster of Caermaen, the ragged
and uneven roofs that marked the winding and
shabby streets, here and there a pointed gable rising
above its meaner fellows; beyond he recognized

58

The Hill of Dreams

the piled mounds that marked the circle of the
amphitheatre, and the dark edge of trees that grew
where the Roman wall whitened and waxed old
beneath the frosts and rains of eighteen hundred
years. Thin and strange, mingled together, the
voices came up to him on the hill; it was as if an
outland race inhabited the ruined city and talked
in a strange language of strange and terrible things.
The sun had slid down the sky, and hung quivering
over the huge dark dome of the mountain like a
burnt sacrifice, and then suddenly vanished. In the
afterglow the clouds began to writhe and turn scar-
let, and shone so strangely reflected in the pools of
the snake-like river, that one would have said the
still waters stirred, the fleeting and changing of the
clouds seeming to quicken the stream, as if it bub-
bled and sent up gouts of blood. But already about
the town the darkness was forming; fast, fast the
shadows crept upon it from the forest, and from
all sides banks and wreaths of curling mist were
gathering, as if a ghostly leaguer were being built
up against the city, and the strange race who lived
in its streets. Suddenly there burst out from the
stillness the clear and piercing music of the reveille,
calling, recalling, iterated, reiterated, and ending
with one long high fierce shrill note with which the
steep hills rang. Perhaps a boy in the school band
was practising on his bugle, but for Lucian it was
magic. For him it was the note of the Roman

59

The Hill of Dreams

trumpet, tuba mirum spargens sonum, filling all the
hollow valley with its command, reverberated in the
dark places in the far forest, and resonant in the
old graveyards without the walls. In his imagina-
tion he saw the earthern gates of the tombs broken
open, and the serried legion swarming to the eagles.
Century by century they passed up ; they rose, drip-
ping, from the river bed, they rose from the level,
their armour shone in the quiet orchard, they gath-
ered in ranks and companies from the cemetery, and
as the trumpet sounded, the hill fort above the town
gave up its dead. By hundreds and thousands the
ghostly battle surged about the standard, behind the
quaking mist, ready to march against the moulder-
ing walls they had built so many years before.

He turned sharply; it was growing very dark,
and he was afraid of missing his way. At first the
path led him by the verge of a wood; there was
a noise of rustling and murmuring from the trees
as if they were taking evil counsel together. A
high hedge shut out the sight of the darkening
valley, and he stumbled on mechanically, without
taking much note of the turnings of the track,
and when he came out from the wood shadow to
the open country, he stood for a moment quite
bewildered and uncertain. A dark wild twilight
country lay before him, confused dim shapes of
trees near at hand, and a hollow below his feet,
and the further hills and woods were dimmer, and

60

The Hill of Dreams

all the air was very still. He gazed about him,
scanning the dusky earth, and trying to make out
some familiar shape, some well-known form of hill
or wood. Suddenly the darkness about him
glowed; a furnace fire had shot up on the moun-
tain, and for a moment the little world of the
woodside and the steep hill shone in a pale light,
and he thought he saw his path beaten out in the
turf before him. The great flame sank down to
a red glint of fire, and it led him on down the
ragged slope, his feet striking against ridges of
ground, and falling from beneath him at a sudden
dip. The bramble bushes shot out long prickly
vines, amongst which he was entangled, and lower
he was held back by wet bubbling earth. He
had descended into a dark and shady valley, beset
and tapestried with gloomy thickets; the weird wood
noises were the only sounds, strange, unutterable
mutterings, dismal, inarticulate. He pushed on in
what he hoped was the right direction, stumbling
from stile to gate, peering through mist and shadow,
and still vainly seeking for any known landmark.
Presently another sound broke upon the grim air,
the murmur of water poured over stones, gurgling
against the old misshapen roots of trees, and run-
ning clear in a deep channel. He passed into the
chill breath of the brook, and almost fancied he
heard two voices speaking in its murmur; there
seemed a ceaseless utterance of words, an endless

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The Hill of Dreams

argument. With a mood of horror pressing on
him, he listened to the noise of waters, and the
wild fancy seized him that he was not deceived,
that two unknown beings stood together there in the
darkness and tried the balances of his life, and
spoke his doom. The hour in the matted thicket
rushed over the great bridge of years to his thought;
he had sinned against the earth, and the earth trem-
bled and shook for vengeance. He stayed still for
a moment, quivering with fear, and at last went
on blindly, no longer caring for the path, if only
he might escape from the toils of that dismal shud-
dering hollow. As he plunged through the hedges
the bristling thorns tore his face and hands; he fell
amongst stinging-nettles and was pricked as he beat
out his way amidst the gorse. He raced headlong,
his head over his shoulder, through a windy wood,
bare of undergrowth; there lay about the ground
mouldering stumps, the relics of trees that had
thundered to their fall, crashing and tearing to
earth, long ago; and from these remains there
flowed out a pale thin radiance, filling the spaces
of the sounding wood with a dream of light. He
had lost all count of the track; he felt he had fled
for hours, climbing and descending, and yet not
advancing; it was as if he stood still and the shadows
of the land went by, in a vision. But at last a
hedge, high and straggling, rose before him, and as

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The Hill of Dreams

he broke through it, his feet slipped, and he fell
headlong down a steep bank into a lane. He lay
still, half-stunned, for a moment, and then rising
unsteadily, he looked desperately into the darkness
before him, uncertain and bewildered. In front it
was black as a midnight cellar, and he turned about,
and saw a glint in the distance, as if a candle
were flickering in a farm-house window. He began
to walk with trembling feet towards the light, when
suddenly something pale started out from the
shadows before him, and seemed to swim and float
down the air. He was going down hill, and he
hastened onwards, and he could see the bars of a
stile framed dimly against the sky, and the figure
still advanced with that gliding motion. Then, as
the road declined to the valley, the landmark he
had been seeking appeared. To his right there
surged up in the darkness the darker summit of the
Roman fort, and the streaming fire of the great full
moon glowed through the bars of the wizard oaks,
and made a halo shine about the hill. He was now
quite close to the white appearance, and saw that
it was only a woman walking swiftly down the
lane; the floating movement was an effect due to
the sombre air and the moon's glamour. At the
gate, where he had spent so many hours gazing at
the fort, they walked foot to foot, and he saw it
was Annie Morgan.

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The Hill of Dreams

'Good evening, Master Lucian,' said the girl,
'it's very dark, sir, indeed.'

'Good evening, Annie,' he answered calling her
by her name for the first time, and he saw that she
smiled with pleasure. 'You are out late, aren't
you?'

'Yes, sir; but I've been taking a bit of supper
to old Mrs. Gibbon. She's been very poorly the
last few days, and there's nobody to do anything
for her.'

Then there were really people who helped one
another; kindness and pity were not mere myths,
fictions of 'society,' as useful as Doe and Roe, and
as non-existent. The thought struck Lucian with
a shock; the evening's passion and delirium,
the wild walk and physical fatigue had almost
shattered him in body and mind. He was 'de-
generate,' decadent, and the rough rains and
blustering winds of life, which a stronger man would
have laughed at and enjoyed, were to him 'hail-
storms and fire-showers.' After all, Messrs. Beit,
the publishers, were only sharp men of business, and
these terrible Dixons and Gervases and Colleys
merely the ordinary limited clergy and gentry of a
quiet country town; sturdier sense would have dis-
missed Dixon as an old humbug, Stanley Gervase,
Esquire, J. P., as a 'bit of a bounder,' and the
ladies as 'rather a shoddy lot' But he was walk-
ing slowly now, in painful silence, his heavy, lag-

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The Hill of Dreams

ging feet striking against the loose stones. He was
not thinking of the girl beside him; only something
seemed to swell and grow and swell within his
heart; it was all the torture of his days, weary hopes
and weary disappointment, scorn rankling and throb-
bing, and the thought 'I had rather call the devils
my brothers and live with them in hell.' He
choked and gasped for breath, and felt involun-
tary muscles working in his face, and the impulses
of a madman stirring him; he himself was in truth
the realisation of the vision of Caermaen that night,
a city with mouldering walls beset by the ghostly
legion. Life and the world and the laws of the
sunlight had passed away, and the resurrection and
kingdom of the dead began. The Celt assailed
him, beckoning from the weird wood he called the
world, and his far-off ancestors, the 'little people'
crept out of their caves, muttering charms and
incantations in hissing inhuman speech; he was be-
leagured by desires that had slept in his race for
ages.

'I am afraid you are very tired, Master Lucian.
Would you like me to give you my hand over this
rough bit?'

He had stumbled against a great round stone
and had nearly fallen. The woman's hand sought
his in the darkness, as he felt the touch of her soft
warm flesh, he moaned, and a pang shot through
his arm to his heart. He looked up and found he

6s

The Hill of Dreams

had only walked a few paces since Annie had spoken;
he had thought they had wandered for hours to-
gether. The moon was just mounting above the
oaks, and the halo round the dark hill brightened.
He stopped short, and keeping his hold of Annie's
hand, looked into her face. A hazy glory of moon-
light shone around them and lit up their eyes. He
had not greatly altered since his boyhood; his face
was pale olive in colour, thin and oval ; marks of
pain had gathered about the eyes, and his black
hair was already stricken with grey. But the eager
curious gaze still remained, and what he saw be-
fore him lit up his sadness with a new fire. She
stopped too, and did not offer to draw away, but
looked back with all her heart. They were alike
in many ways ; her skin was also of that olive colour,
but her face was sweet as a beautiful summer night,
and her black eyes showed no dimness, and the
smile on the scarlet lips was like a flame when it
brightens a dark and lonely land.

'You are sorely tired, Master Lucian, let us sit
down here by the gate.'

It was Lucian who spoke next: 'My dear, my
dear!' And their lips were together again, and
their arms locked together, each holding the other
fast. And then the poor lad let his head sink
down on his sweetheart's breast, and burst into a
passion of weeping. The tears streamed down his
face, and he shook with sobbing, in the happiest

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The Hill of Dreams

moment that he had ever lived. The woman bent
over him and tried to comfort him, but his tears
were his consolation and his triumph. Annie was
whispering to him, her hand laid on his heart; she
was whispering beautiful, wonderful words, that
soothed him as a song. He did not know what
they meant.

'Annie, dear, dear Annie, what are you saying
to me? I have never heard such beautiful words.
Tell me, Annie, what do they mean?'

She laughed and said it was only nonsense that
the nurses sang to the children.

'No, no, you are not to call me Master Lucian
any more,' he said, when they parted, 'you must
call me Lucian; and I, I worship you, my dear
Annie.'

He fell down before her, embracing her knees,
and adored, and she allowed him, and confirmed
his worship. He followed slowly after her, pass-
ing the path which led to her home with a longing
glance. Nobody saw any difference in Lucian when
he reached the rectory. He came in with his usual
dreamy indifference, and told how he had lost his
way by trying the short cut. He said he had met
Dr. Burrows on the road, and that he had recom-
mended the path by the fields. Then, as dully as
if he had been reading some story out of a news-
paper, he gave his father the outlines of the Beit
case, producing the pretty little book called The

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The Hill of Dreams

Chorus in Green. The parson listened in amaze-
ment.

'You mean to tell me that you wrote this book?'
he said. He was quite roused.

'No; not all of it. Look; this bit is mine, and
that; and the beginning of this chapter. Nearly
the whole of the third chapter is by me.'

He closed the book without interest, and indeed
he felt astonished at his father's excitement. The
incident seemed to him; unimportant.

'And you say that eighty or ninety pages of
this book are yours, and these scoundrels have
stolen your work?'

'Well, I suppose they have. I'll fetch the manu-
script, if you would like to look at it.'

The manuscript was duly produced, wrapped in
brown paper, with Messrs. Beit's address label on
it, and the post-office dated stamps.

'And the other book has been out a month.'

The parson, forgetting the sacerdotal office, and
his good habit of grinning, swore at Messrs. Beit
and Mr. Ritson, calling them damned thieves, and
then began to read the manuscript, and to compare
it with the printed book.

'Why, it's splendid work. My poor fellow,' he
said after a while, 'I had no notion you could write
so well. I used to think of such things in the old
days at Oxford; 'old Bill,' the tutor, used to praise
my essays, but I never wrote anything like this.

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The Hill of Dreams

And this infernal ruffian of a Ritson has taken all
your best things and mixed them up with his own
rot to make it go down. Of course you'll expose
the gang?'

Lucian was mildly amused; he couldn't enter into
his father's feelings at all. He sat smoking in
one of the old easy chairs, taking the rare relish of a
hot grog with his pipe, and gazing out of his
dreamy eyes at the violent old parson. He was
pleased that his father liked his book, because he
knew him to be a deep and sober scholar and a
cool judge of good letters; but he laughed to him-
self when he saw the magic of print. The parson
had expressed no wish to read the manuscript when
it came back in disgrace; he had merely grinned,
said something about boomerangs, and quoted
Horace with relish. Whereas now, before the book
in its neat case, lettered with another man's name,
his approbation of the writing and his disapproval
of the 'scoundrels,' as he called them, were loudly
expressed, and though a good smoker, he blew and
puffed vehemently at his pipe.

'You'll expose the rascals, of course, won't you?'
he said again.

'Oh no, I think not. It really doesn't matter
much, does it? After all, there are some very
weak things in the book; doesn't it strike you as
'young?' I have been thinking of another plan,
but I haven't done much with it lately. But I

The Hill of Dreams

believe I've got hold of a really good idea this
time, and if I can manage to see the heart of it I
hope to turn out a manuscript worth stealing.
But it's so hard to get at the core of an idea — the
heart, as I call it,' he went on after a pause. 'It's
like having a box you can't open, though you know
there's something wonderful inside. But I do be-
lieve I've a fine thing in my hands, and I mean to
try my best to work it.'

Lucian talked with enthusiasm now, but his
father, on his side, could not share these ardours.
It was his part to be astonished at excitement over
a book that was not even begun, the mere ghost
of a book flitting elusive in the world of unborn
masterpieces and failures. He had loved good
letters, but he shared unconsciously in the general
belief that literary attempt is always pitiful, though
he did not subscribe to the other half of the popular
faith — that literary success is a matter of very little
importance. He thought well of books, but only of
printed books; in manuscripts he put no faith, and
the paulo-post-futurum tense he could not in any
maner conjugate. He returned once more to the
topic of palpable interest.

'But about this dirty trick these fellows have
played on you. You won't sit down quietly and
bear it, surely? It's only a question of writing to
the papers.'

They wouldn't put the letter in. And if they
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The Hill of Dreams

did, I should only get laughed at. Some time ago
a man wrote to the Reader, complaining of his play
being stolen. He said that he had sent a little
one-act comedy to Burleigh, the great dramatist,
asking for his advice. Burleigh gave his advice and
took the idea for his own very successful play. So
the man said, and I daresay it was true enough.
But the victim got nothing by his complaint. "A
pretty state of things," everybody said. "Here's
a Mr. Tomson, that no one has ever heard of,
bothers Burleigh with his rubbish, and then accuses
him of petty larceny. Is it likely that a man of
Burleigh's position, a playwright who can make his
five thousand a year easily, would borrow from an
unknown Tomson?" I should think it very likely,
indeed,' Lucian went on, chuckling, 'but that was
the verdict. No; I don't think I'll write to the
papers.'

'Well, well, my boy, I suppose you know your
own business best. I think you are mistaken, but
you must do as you like.'

'It's all so unimportant,' said Lucian, and he
really thought so. He had sweeter things to dream
of, and desired no communion of feeling with that
madman who had left Caermaen some four hours
before. He felt he had made a fool of himself,
he was ashamed to think of the fatuity of which
he had been guilty; such boiling hatred was not
only wicked, but absurd. A man could do no good

71

The Hill of Dreams

who put himself into a position of such violent
antagonism against his fellow-creatures; so Lucian
rebuked his heart, saying that he was old enough
to know better. But he remembered that he had
sweeter things to dream of; there was a secret
ecstasy that he treasured and locked tight away,
as a joy too exquisite even for thought till he was
quite alone; and then there was that scheme for a
new book that he had laid down hopelessly some
time ago; it seemed to have arisen into life again
within the last hour; he understood that he had
started on a false tack, he had taken the wrong
aspect of his idea. Of course the thing couldn't
be written in that way; it was like trying to read a
page turned upside down; and he saw those char-
acters he had vainly sought suddenly disambushed,
and a splendid inevitable sequence of events un-
rolled before him.

It was a true resurrection; the dry plot he had
constructed revealed itself as a living thing, stir-
ring and mysterious, and warm as life itself. The
parson was smoking stolidly to all appearance, but
in reality he was full of amazement at his own
son, and now and again he slipped sly furtive
glances towards the tranquil young man in the arm-
chair by the empty hearth. In the first place, Mr.
Taylor was genuinely impressed by what he had
read of Lucian's work; he had so long been ac-
customed to look upon all effort as futile, that

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The Hill of Dreams

success amazed him. In the abstract, of course,
he was prepared to admit that some people did
write well and got published and made money, just
as other persons successfully backed an outsider at
heavy odds; but it had seemed as improbable that
Lucian should show even the beginnings of achieve-
ment in one direction as in the other. Then the
boy evidently cared so little about it; he did not
appear to be proud of being worth robbing, nor
was he angry with the robbers.

He sat back luxuriously in the disreputable old
chair, drawing long slow wreaths of smoke, tasting
his whisky from time to time, and evidently well
at ease with himself. The father saw him smile,
and it suddenly dawned upon him that his son was
very handsome; he had such kind gentle eyes and
a kind mouth, and his pale cheeks were flushed like
a girl's. Mr. Taylor felt moved. What a harm-
less young fellow Lucian had been; no doubt a little
queer and different from others, but wholly inof-
fensive, and patient under disappointment and Miss
Deacon. Her contribution to the evening's dis-
cussion had been characteristic; she had remarked,
firstly, that writing was a very unsettling occupation,
and secondly, that it was extremely foolish to en-
trust one's property to people of whom one knew
nothing. Father and son had smiled together at
these observations, which were probably true
enough. Mr. Taylor at last left Lucian alone; he

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The Hill of Dreams

shook hands with a good deal of respect, and said,
almost deferentially:

'You mustn't work too hard, old fellow. I
wouldn't stay up too late, if I were you, after that
long walk. You must have gone miles out of your
way.'

'I'm not tired now, though. I feel as if I could
write my new book on the spot'; and the young
man laughed a gay sweet laugh that struck the
father as a new note in his son's life.

He sat still a moment after his father had left
the room. He cherished his chief treasure of
thought in its secret place; he would not enjoy it
yet. He drew up a chair to the table at which he
wrote, or tried to write, and began taking pens
and paper from the drawer. There was a great
pile of ruled paper there; all of it used, on one
side, and signifying many hours of desperate scrib-
bling, of heart-searching and rack of his brain; an
array of poor, eager lines written by a waning fire
with waning hope; all useless and abandoned. He
took up the sheets cheerfully, and began in delicious
idleness to look over these fruitless efforts. A page
caught his attention; he remembered how he wrote
it while a November storm was dashing against the
panes; and there was another, with a queer blot
in one corner; he had got up from his chair and
looked out, and all the earth was white fairyland,

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and the snowflakes whirled round and round in the
wind. Then he saw the chapter begun of a night in
March: a great gale blew that night and rooted
up one of the ancient yews in the churchyard. He
had heard the trees shrieking in the woods, and
the long wail of the wind, and across the heaven a
white moon fled awfully before the streaming clouds.
And all these poor abandoned pages now seemed
sweet, and past unhappiness was transmuted into
happiness, and the nights of toil were holy. He
turned over half a dozen leaves and began to sketch
out the outlines of the new book on the unused
pages; running out a skeleton plan on one page,
and dotting fancies, suggestions, hints on others.
He wrote rapidly, overjoyed to find that loving
phrases grew under his pen; a particular scene he
had imagined filled him with desire; he gave his
hand free course, and saw the written work glow-
ing; and action and all the heat of existence quick-
ened and beat on the wet page. Happy fancies
took shape in happier words, and when at last he
leant back in his chair he felt the stir and rush of
the story as if it had been some portion of his own
life. He read over what he had done with a re-
newed pleasure in the nimble and flowing work-
manship, and as he put the little pile of manuscript
tenderly in the drawer he paused to enjoy the
anticipation of to-morrow's labour.

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The Hill of Dreams

And then but the rest of the night was given

to tender and delicious things, and when he went
up to bed a scarlet dawn was streaming from the
east.

Ill

FOR days Lucian lay in a swoon of pleasure,
smiling when he was addressed, sauntering
happily in the sunlight, hugging recollection
warm to his heart. Annie had told him that she
was going on a visit to her married sister, and said,
with a caress, that he must be patient. He pro-
tested against her absence, but she fondled him,
whispering her charms in his ear till he gave in,
and then they said good-bye, Lucian adoring on his
knees. The parting was as strange as the meeting,
and that night when he laid his work aside, and let
himself sink deep into the joys of memory, all the
encounter seemed as wonderful and impossible as
magic.

'And you really don't mean to do anything about
those rascals?' said his father.

'Rascals? Which rascals? Oh, you mean Beit.
I had forgotten all about it. No; I don't think I
shall trouble. They're not worth powder and
shot.'

And he returned to his dream, pacing slowly from
the medlar to the quince and back again. It seemed
trivial to be interrupted by such questions; he had

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not even time to think of the book he had recom-
menced so eagerly, much less of this labour of long
ago. He recollected without interest that it cost
him many pains, that it was pretty good here and
there, and that it had been stolen, and it seemed
that there was nothing more to be said on the mat-
ter. He wished to think of the darkness in the
lane, of the kind voice that spoke to him, of the
kind hand that sought his own, as he stumbled on
the rough way. So far, it was wonderful. Since
he had left school and lost the company of the
worthy barbarians who had befriended him there,
he had almost lost the sense of kinship with hu-
manity; he had come to dread the human form
as men dread the hood of the cobra. To Lucian a
man or a woman meant something that stung, that
spoke words that rankled, and poisoned his life
with scorn. At first such malignity shocked him:
he would ponder over words and glances and won-
der if he were not mistaken, and he still sought now
and then for sympathy. The poor boy had ro-
mantic ideas about women; he believed they were
merciful and pitiful, very kind to the unlucky and
helpless. Men perhaps had to be different; after
all, the duty of a man was to get on in the world,
or, in plain language, to make money, to be suc-
cessful; to cheat rather than to be cheated, but
always to be successful; and he could understand
that one who fell below this high standard must

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expect to be severely judged by his fellows. For
example, there was young Bennett, Miss Spurry's
nephew. Lucian had met him once or twice when
he was spending his holidays with Miss Spurry,
and the two young fellows had compared literary
notes together. Bennett showed some beautiful
things he had written, over which Lucian had grown
both sad and enthusiastic. It was such exquisite
magic verse, and so much better than anything he
ever hoped to write, that there was a touch of
anguish in his congratulations. But when Bennett,
after many vain prayers to his aunt, threw up a
safe position in the bank, and betook himself to a
London garret, Lucian was not surprised at the
general verdict.

Mr. Dixon, as a clergyman, viewed the question
from a high standpoint and found it all deplorable,
but the general opinion was that Bennett was a
hopeless young lunatic. Old Mr. Gervase went
purple when his name was mentioned, and the
young Dixons sneered very merrily over the ad-
venture.

'I always thought he was a beastly young ass,'
said Edward Dixon, 'but I didn't think he'd chuck
away his chances like that. Said he couldn't stand
a bank! I hope he'll be able to stand bread and
water. That's all those littery fellows get, I be-
lieve, except Tennyson and Mark Twain and those
sort of people.'

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Lucian of course sympathised with the unfortu-
nate Bennett, but such judgments were after all
only natural. The young man might have stayed
in the bank and succeeded to his aunt's thousand a
year, and everybody would have called him a very
nice young fellow — 'clever, too.' But he had de-
liberately chosen, as Edward Dixon had said, to
chuck his chances away for the sake of literature;
piety and a sense of the main chance had alike
pointed the way to a delicate course of wheedling,
to a little harmless practising on Miss Spurry's in-
firmities, to frequent compliances of a soothing na-
ture, and the 'young ass' had been blind to the
direction of one and the other. It seemed almost
right that the vicar should moralise, that Edward
Dixon should sneer, and that Mr. Gervase should
grow purple with contempt. Men, Lucian thought,
were like judges, who may pity the criminal in their
hearts, but are forced to vindicate the outraged
majesty of the law by a severe sentence. He felt
the same considerations applied to his own case;
he knew that his father should have had more
money, that his clothes should be newer and of a
better cut, that he should have gone to the uni-
versity and made good friends. If such had been
his fortune he could have looked his fellow-men
proudly in the face, upright and unashamed. Hav-
ing put on the whole armour of a first-rate West
End tailor, with money in his purse, having taken

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anxious thought for the morrow, and having some
useful friends and good prospects; in such a case
he might have held his head high in a gentlemanly
and Christian community. As it was he had usually
avoided the reproachful glance of his fellows, feel-
ing that he deserved their condemnation. But he
had cherished for a long time his romantic senti-
mentalities about women: literary conventions bor-
rowed from the minor poets and pseudo-mediaeval-
ists, or so he thought afterwards. But, fresh from
school, wearied a little with the perpetual society
of barbarian though worthy boys, he had in his
soul a charming image of womanhood, before which
he worshipped with mingled passion and devotion.
It was a nude figure, perhaps, but the shining arms
were to be wound about the neck of a vanquished
knight, there was rest for the head of a wounded
lover; the hands were stretched forth to do works
of pity, and the smiling lips were to murmur not
love alone, but consolation in defeat. Here was
the refuge for a broken heart; here the scorn of
men would but make tenderness increase; here was
all pity and all charity with loving-kindness. It was
a delightful picture, conceived in the 'come rest on
this bosom,' and 'a ministering angel thou' man-
ner, with touches of allurement that made devotion
all the sweeter. He soon found that he had ideal-
ised a little; in the affair of young Bennett, while the
men were contemptuous the women were virulent.

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The Hill of Dreams

He had been rather fond of Agatha Gervase, and
she, so other ladies said, had 'set her cap' at him.
Now, when he rebelled, and lost the goodwill of
his aunt, dear Miss Spurry, Agatha insulted him
with all conceivable rapidity. 'After all, Mr. Ben-
nett,' she said, 'you will be nothing better than a
beggar; now will you? You mustn't think me cruel,
but I can't help speaking the truth. Write books!'
Her expression filled up the incomplete sentence;
she waggled with indignant emotion. These pas-
sages came to Lucian's ears, and indeed the Ger-
vases boasted of 'how well poor Agatha had be-
haved.'

'Never mind, Gathy,' old Gervase had observed.
'If the impudent young puppy comes here again
we'll see what Thomas can do with the horse-
whip.'

'Poor dear child,' Mrs. Gervase added in telling
the tale, 'and she was so fond of him too. But
of course it couldn't go on after his shameful be-
haviour.'

But Lucian was troubled; he sought vainly for
the ideal womanly, the tender note of 'come rest
on this bosom.' Ministering angels, he felt con-
vinced, do not rub red pepper and sulphuric acid
into the wounds of suffering mortals.

Then there was the case of Mr. Vaughan, a
squire in the neighbourhood, at whose board all
the aristocracy of Caermaen had feasted for years.

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Mr. Vaughan had a first-rate cook, and his cellar
was rare, and he was never so happy as when he
shared his good things with his friends. His
mother kept his house, and they delighted all the
girls with frequent dances, while the men sighed
over the amazing champagne. Investments proved
disastrous, and Mr. Vaughan had to sell the grey
manor-house by the river. He and his mother took
a little modern stucco villa in Caermaen, wishing to
be near their dear friends. But the men were 'very
sorry; rough on you, Vaughan. Always thought
those Patagonians were risky, but you wouldn't hear
of it. Hope we shall see you before very long;
you and Mrs. Vaughan must come to tea some day
after Christmas.'

'Of course we are all very sorry for them," said
Henrietta Dixon. 'No, we haven't called on Mrs.
Vaughan yet. They have no regular servant, you
know; only a woman in the morning. I hear old
mother Vaughan, as Edward will call her, does
nearly everything. And their house is absurdly
small; it's little more than a cottage. One really
can't call it a gentleman's house.'

Then Mr. Vaughan, his heart in the dust, went
to the Gervases and tried to borrow five pounds of
Mr. Gervase. He had to be ordered out of the
house, and, as Edith Gervase said, it was all very
painful; 'he went out in such a funny way,' she
added, 'just like the dog when he's had a whipping.

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Of course it's sad, even if it is all his own fault, as
everybody says, but he looked so ridiculous as he
was going down the steps that I couldn't help laugh-
ing.' Mr. Vaughan had heard the ringing, youth-
ful laughter as he crossed the lawn.

Young girls like Henrietta Dixon and Edith
Gervase naturally viewed the Vaughans' comical
position with all the high spirits of their age, but
the elder ladies could not look at matters in this
frivolous light.

'Hush, dear, hush,' said Mrs. Gervase, 'it's all too
shocking to be a laughing matter. Don't you agree
with me, Mrs. Dixon? The sinful extravagance
that went on at Pentre always frightened me. You
remember that ball they gave last year? Mr. Ger-
vase assured me that the champagne must have cost
at least a hundred and fifty shillings the dozen.'

'It's dreadful, isn't it,' said Mrs. Dixon, 'when
one thinks of how many poor people there are who
would be thankful for a crust of bread?'

'Yes, Mrs. Dixon,' Agatha joined in, 'and you
know how absurdly the Vaughans spoilt the cot-
tagers. Oh, it was really wicked; one would think
Mr. Vaughan wished to make them above their
station. Edith and I went for a walk one day
nearly as far as Pentre, and we begged a glass of
water of old Mrs. Jones who lives in that pretty
cottage near the brook. She began praising the
Vaughans in the most fulsome manner, and showed

The Hill of Dreams

us some flannel things they had given her at Christ-
mas. I assure you, my dear Mrs. Dixon, the
flannel was the very best quality; no lady could wish
for better. It couldn't have cost less than half-a-
crown a yard.'

'I know, my dear, I know. Mr. Dixon always
said it couldn't last. How often I have heard him
say that the Vaughans were pauperising all the com-
mon people about Pentre, and putting every one else
in a most unpleasant position. Even from a
worldly point of view it was very poor taste on their
part. So different from the true charity that Paul
speaks of.'

'I only wish they had given away nothing worse
than flannel,' said Miss Colley, a young lady of
very strict views. 'But I assure you there was a
perfect orgy, I can call it nothing else, every Christ-
mas. Great joints of prime beef, and barrels of
strong beer, and snuff and tobacco distributed
wholesale; as if the poor wanted to be encouraged
in their disgusting habits. It was really impossible
to go through the village for weeks after ; the whole
place was poisoned with the fumes of horrid tobacco
pipes.'

'Well, we see how that sort of thing ends,' said
Mrs. Dixon, summing up judicially. 'We had in-
tended to call, but I really think it would be impos-
sible after what Mrs. Gervase has told us. The
idea of Mr. Vaughan trying to sponge on poor

The Hill of Dreams

Mr. Gervase in that shabby way! I think mean-
ness of that kind is so hateful.'

It was the practical side of all this that aston-
ished Lucian. He saw that in reality there was no
high-flown quixotism in a woman's nature: the
smooth arms, made he had thought for caressing,
seemed muscular; the hands meant for the doing of
works of pity in his system, appeared dexterous in
the giving of 'stingers,' as Barnes might say, and
the smiling lips could sneer with great ease. Nor
was he more fortunate in his personal experiences.
As has been told, Mrs. Dixon spoke of him in
connection with 'judgments,' and the younger
ladies did not exactly cultivate his acquaintance.
Theoretically they 'adored' books and thought
poetry 'too sweet,' but in practice they preferred
talking about mares and fox-terriers and their
neighbours.

They were nice girls enough, very like other
young ladies in other country towns, content with
the teaching of their parents, reading the Bible
every morning in their bedrooms, and sitting every
Sunday in church amongst the well-dressed 'sheep'
on the right hand. It was not their fault if they
failed to satisfy the ideal of an enthusiastic dreamy
boy, and indeed, they would have thought his
feigned woman immodest, absurdly sentimental, a
fright ('never wears stays, my dear'), and horrid.

At first he was a good deal grieved at the loss of

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that charming tender woman, the work of his brain.
When the Miss Dixons went haughtily by with a
scornful waggle, when the Miss Gervases passed in
the wagonette, laughing as the mud splashed him,
the poor fellow would look up with a face of grief
that must have been very comic ; 'like a dying duck,'
as Edith Gervase said. Edith was really very
pretty, and he would have liked to talk to her, even
about fox-terriers, if she would have listened. One
afternoon at the Dixons' he really forced himself
upon her, and with all the obtuseness of an en-
thusiastic boy tried to discuss the Lotus Eaters of
Tennyson. It was too absurd. Captain Kempton
was making signals to Edith all the time, and Lieu-
tenant Gatwick had gone off in disgust, and he had
promised to bring her a puppy 'by Vick out of
Wasp.' At last the poor girl could bear it no
longer :

'Yes, it's very sweet,' she said at last. 'When
did you say you were going to London, Mr.
Taylor?'

It was about the time that his disappointment
became known to everybody, and the shot told.
He gave her a piteous look and slunk off, 'just like
the dog when he's had a whipping,' to use Edith's
own expression. Two or three lessons of this de-
scription produced their due effect; and when he saw
a male Dixon or Gervase approaching him he bit
his lip and summoned up his courage. But when

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he descried a 'ministering angel' he made haste and
hid behind a hedge or took to the woods. In course
of time the desire to escape became an instinct, to
be followed as a matter of course; in the same way
he avoided the adders on the mountain. His old
ideals were almost if not quite forgotten; he knew
that the female of the bete humalne, like the adder,
would in all probability sting, and he therefore
shrank from its trail, but without any feeling of
special resentment. The one had a poisoned
tongue as the other had a poisoned fang, and it was
well to leave them both alone. Then had come
that sudden fury of rage against all humanity, as
he went out of Caermaen carrying the book that
had been stolen from him by the enterprising Beit.
He shuddered as he thought of how nearly he had
approached the verge of madness, when his eyes
filled with blood and the earth seemed to burn with
fire. He remembered how he had looked up to
the horizon and the sky was blotched with scarlet;
and the earth was deep red, with red woods and
red fields. There was something of horror in the
memory, and in the vision of that wild night walk
through dim country, when every shadow seemed a
symbol of some terrible impending doom. The
murmur of the brook, the wind shrilling through
the wood, the pale light flowing from the mouldered
trunks, and the picture of his own figure fleeing and
fleeting through the shades; all these seemed un-

The Hill of Dreams

happy things that told a story in fatal hieroglyphics.
And then the life and laws of the sunlight had
passed away, and the resurrection and kingdom of
the dead began. Though his limbs were weary, he
had felt his muscles grow strong as steel; a woman,
one of the hated race, was beside him in the dark-
ness, and the wild beast woke within him, ravening
for blood and brutal lust; all the raging desires of
the dim race from which he came assailed his heart.
The ghosts issued out from the weird wood and
from the caves in the hills, besieging him, as he had
imagined the spiritual legion besieging Caermaen,
beckoning him to a hideous battle and a victory that
he had never imagined in his wildest dreams. And
then out of the darkness the kind voice spoke again,
and the kind hand was stretched out to draw him up
from the pit. It was sweet to think of that which
he had found at last; the boy's picture incarnate, all
the passion and compassion of his longing, all the
pity and love and consolation. She, that beautiful
passionate woman offering up her beauty in sacrifice
to him, she was worthy indeed of his worship. He
remembered how his tears had fallen upon her
breast, and how tenderly she had soothed him, whis-
pering those wonderful unknown words that sang to
his heart. And she had made herself defenceless
before him, caressing and fondling the body that had
been so despised. He exulted in the happy thought
that he had knelt down on the ground before her,

The Hill of Dreams

and had embraced her knees and worshipped. The
woman's body had become his religion; he lay awake
at night looking into the darkness with hungry eyes,
wishing for a miracle, that the appearance of the
so-desired form might be shaped before him. And
when he was alone in quiet places in the wood, he
fell down again on his knees, and even on his face,
stretching out vain hands in the air, as if they would
feel her flesh. His father noticed in those days
that the inner pocket of his coat was stuffed with
papers; he would see Lucian walking up and down
in a secret shady place at the bottom of the orchard,
reading from his sheaf of manuscript, replacing the
leaves, and again drawing them out. He would
walk a few quick steps, and pause as if enraptured,
gazing in the air as if he looked through the sha-
dows of the world into some sphere of glory,
feigned by his thought. Mr. Taylor was almost
alarmed at the sight; he concluded of course that
Lucian was writing a book. In the first place, there
seemed something immodest in seeing the operation
performed under one's eyes; it was as if the 'make-
up' of a beautiful actress were done on the stage, in
full audience ; as if one saw the rounded calves fixed
in position, the fleshings drawn on, the voluptuous
outlines of the figure produced by means purely
mechanical, blushes mantling from the paint-pot,
and the golden tresses well secured by the wig-
maker. Books, Mr. Taylor thought, should swim

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into one's ken mysteriously; they should appear all
printed and bound, without apparent genesis; just
as children are suddenly told that they have a little
sister, found by mamma in the garden. But Lucian
was not only engaged in composition; he was plainly
rapturous, enthusiastic; Mr. Taylor saw him throw
up his hands, and bow his head with strange gesture.
The parson began to fear that his son was like some
of those mad Frenchmen of whom he had read,
young fellows who had a sort of fury of
literature, and gave their whole lives to it, spending
days over a page, and years over a book, pursuing
art as Englishmen pursue money, building up a ro-
mance as if it were a business. Now Mr. Taylor
held firmly by the 'walking-stick' theory; he believed
that a man of letters should have a real profession,
some solid employment in life. 'Get something to
do,' he would have liked to say, 'and then you can
write as much as you please. Look at Scott, look
at Dickens and Trollope.' And then there was a
social point of view; it might be right, or it might
be wrong, but there could be no doubt that the lit-
erary man, as such, was not thought much of in Eng-
lish society. Mr. Taylor knew his Thackeray, and
he remembered that old Major Pendennis, society
personified, did not exactly boast of his neph-
ew's occupation. Even Warrington was rather
ashamed to own his connection with journalism,
and Pendennis himself laughed openly at his novel-

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writing as an agreeable way of making money, a
useful appendage to the cultivation of dukes, his
true business in life. This was the plain English
view, and Mr. Taylor was no doubt right enough
in thinking it good, practical common sense.
Therefore when he saw Lucian loitering and saun-
tering, musing amorously over his manuscript,
exhibiting manifest signs of that fine fury which
Britons have ever found absurd, he felt grieved at
heart, and more than ever sorry that he had not
been able to send the boy to Oxford.

'B.N.C. would have knocked all this nonsense
out of him,' he thought. 'He would have taken a
double First like my poor father and made some-
thing of a figure in the world. However, it can't
be helped.' The poor man sighed, and lit his pipe,
and walked in another part of the garden.

But he was mistaken in his diagnosis of the symp-
toms. The book that Lucian had begun lay un-
heeded in the drawer; it was a secret work that he
was engaged on, and the manuscripts that he took
out of that inner pocket never left him day or night.
He slept with them next to his heart, and he would
kiss them when he was quite alone, a,nd pay them
such devotions as he would have paid to her whom
they symbolized. He wrote on these leaves a
wonderful ritual of praise and devotion; it was the
liturgy of his religion. Again and again he copied
and recopied this madness of a lover; dallying all

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day over the choice of a word, searching for more
exquisite phrases. No common words, no such
phrases as he might use in a tale would suffice ; the
sentences of worship must stir and be quickened,
they must glow and burn, and be decked out as with
rare work of jewellery. Every part of that holy
and beautiful body must be adored; he sought for
terms of extravagant praise, he bent his soul and
mind low before her, licking the dust under her feet,
abased and yet rejoicing as a Templar before the
image of Baphomet. He exulted more especially
in the knowledge that there was nothing of the con-
ventional or common in his ecstasy; he was not the
fervent, adoring lover of Tennyson's poems, who
loved with passion and yet with a proud respect,
with the love always of a gentleman for a lady.
Annie was not a lady; the Morgans had farmed
their lands for hundreds of years; they were what
Mrs. Gervase and Miss Colley and the rest of them
called common people. Tennyson's noble gentle-
men thought of their ladies with something of ret-
icence : they imagined them dressed in flowing and
courtly robes, walking with slow dignity; they
dreamed of them as always stately, the future mis-
tresses of their houses, mothers of their heirs.
Such lovers bowed, but not to low, remembering
their own honour, before those who were to be
equal companions and friends as well as wives. It
was not such conceptions as these that he embodied

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in the amazing emblems of his ritual; he was not,
he told himself, a young officer, 'something in the
city,' or a rising barrister engaged to a Miss Dixon
or a Miss Gervase. He had not thought of look-
ing out for a nice little house in a good residential
suburb where they would have pleasant society,
there were to be no consultations about wall-papers,
or jocose whispers from friends as to the necessity
of having a room that would do for a nursery. No
glad young thing had leant on his arm while they
chose the suite in white enamel, and the china for
'our bed-room,' the modest salesman doing his best
to spare their blushes. When Edith Gervase mar-
ried she would get mamma to look out for two
really good servants, 'as we must begin quietly,' and
mamma would make sure that the drains and every-
thing were right. Then her 'girl friends' would
come on a certain solemn day to see all her 'lovely
things.' 'Two dozen of everything!' 'Look,
Ethel, did you ever see such ducky frills?' 'And
that insertion, isn't it quite too sweet?' 'My dear
Edith you are a lucky girl.' 'All the underlinen
specially made by Madame Lulu !' 'What delicious
things !' 'I hope he knows what a prize he is win-
ning.' 'Oh ! do look at those lovely ribbon-bows !'
'You darling, how happy you must be.' Real Val-
enciennes!' Then a whisper in the lady's ear, and
her reply, 'Oh, don't, Nelly!' So they would chirp
over their chemises, as in Rabelais they chirped over

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their cups: and everything would be done in due
order till the wedding-day, when mamma, who had
strained her sinews and the commandments to bring
the match about, would weep and look indignantly
at the unhappy bridegroom. 'I hope you'll be kind
to her, Robert.' Then in a rapid whisper to the
bride: 'Mind you insist on Wyman's flushing the
drains when you come back; servants are so careless
and dirty too. Don't let him go about by himself
in Paris. Men are so queer; one never knows.
You have got the pills?' And aloud, after these
secreta, 'God bless you, my dear ; good-bye ! cluck,
clu'ck, good-bye !'

There were stranger things written in the manu-
script pages that Lucian cherished, sentences that
burnt and glowed like 'coals of fire which hath a
most vehement flame.' There were phrases that
stung and tingled as he wrote them, and sonorous
words poured out in ecstasy and rapture, as in some
of the old litanies. He hugged the thought that a
great part of what he had invented was in the true
sense of the word occult: page after page might
have been read aloud to the uninitiated without be-
traying the inner meaning. He dreamed night and
day over these symbols, he copied and re-copied the
manuscript nine times before he wrote it out fairly
in a little book which he made himself of a skin
of creamy vellum. In his mania for acquirements
that should be entirely useless he had gained some

The Hill of Dreams

skill in illumination, or limning as he preferred to
call it, always choosing the obscurer word as the ob-
scurer arts. First he set himself to the severe prac-
tice of the text; he spent many hours and days of
toil in struggling to fashion the serried columns
of black letter, writing and re-writing till he could
shape the massive character with firm true hand.
He cut his quills with the patience of a monk in the
scriptorium, shaving and altering the nib, lightening
and increasing the pressure and flexibility of the
points, till the pen satisfied him, and gave a stroke
both broad and even. Then he made experiments
in inks, searching for some medium that would ri-
val the glossy black letter of the old manuscripts;
and not till he could produce a fair page of text did
he turn to the more entrancing labours of the capi-
tals and borders and ornaments. He mused long
over the Lombardic letters, as glorious in their way
as a cathedral, and trained his hand to execute the
bold and flowing lines; and then there was the art
of the border, blossoming in fretted splendour all
about the page. His cousin, Miss Deacon, called
it all a great waste of time, and his father thought
he would have done much better in trying to im-
prove his ordinary handwriting, which was both
ugly and illegible. Indeed, there seemed but a
poor demand for the limner's art. He sent some
specimens of his skill to an 'artistic firm' in London;
a verse of the 'Maud,' curiously emblazoned, and a

The Hill of Dreams

Latin hymn with the notes pricked on a red stave.
The firm wrote civilly, telling him that his work,
though good, was not what they wanted, and en-
closing an illuminated text. 'We have a great de-
mand for this sort of thing,' they concluded, 'and
if you care to attempt something in this style we
should be pleased to look at it.' The said text was
'Thou, God, seest me.' The letter was of a de-
graded form, bearing much the same relation to
the true character as a 'churchwarden gothic' build-
ing does to Canterbury Cathedral; the colours were
varied. The initial was pale gold, the h pink, the
o black, the u blue, and the first letter was somehow
connected with a bird's nest containing the young
of the pigeon, who were waited on by the female
bird.

'What a pretty text,' said Miss Deacon. 'I
should like to nail it up in my room. Why don't
you try to do something like that, Lucian? You
might make something by it.'

'I sent them these,' said Lucian, 'but they don't
like them much.'

'My dear boy! I should think not! Like
them! What were you thinking of to draw those
queer stiff flowers all round the border? Roses?
They don't look like roses at all events. Where
do you get such ideas from?'

'But the design is appropriate; look at the
words.'

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'My dear Lucian, I can't read the words; it's
such a queer old-fashioned writing. Look how
plain that text is; one can see what it's about.
And this other one; I can't make it out at all.'

'It's a Latin hymn.'

'A Latin hymn? Is it a Protestant hymn? I
may be old-fashioned, but Hymns Ancient and
Modern is quite good enough for me. This is the
music I suppose? But, my dear boy, there are only
four lines ; and who ever heard of notes shaped like
that: you have made some square and some dia-
mond-shaped? Why didn't you look in your poor
mother's old music? It's in the ottoman in the
drawing-room. I could have shown you how to
make the notes; there are crotchets, you know, and
quavers.'

Miss Deacon laid down the illuminated Urbs
Beata in despair; she felt convinced that her cousin
was 'next door to an idiot.'

And he went out into the garden and raged be-
hind a hedge. He broke two flower-pots and hit
an apple tree very hard with his stick, and then,
feeling more- calm, wondered what was the use of
trying to do anything. He would not have put the
thought into words, but in his heart he was ag-
grieved that his cousin liked the pigeons and the
text, and did not like his emblematical roses and
the Latin hymns. He knew he had taken great
pains over the work, and that it was well done, and

The Hill of Dreams

being still a young man he expected praise. He
found that in this hard world there was a lack of
appreciation; a critical spirit seemed abroad. If
he could have been scientifically observed as he
writhed and smarted under the strictures of 'the
old fool,' as he rudely called his cousin, the spec-
tacle would have been extremely diverting. Little
boys sometimes enjoy a very similar entertainment;
either with their tiny fingers or with mamma's nail-
scissors they gradually deprive a fly of its wings and
legs. The odd gyrations and queer thin buzzings
of the creature as it spins comically round and round
never fail to provide a fund of harmless amuse-
ment. Lucian, indeed, fancied himself a very ill-
used individual; but he should have tried to imitate
the nervous organisation of the flies, which, as
mamma says, 'can't really feel.'

But now, as he prepared the vellum leaves he
remembered his art with joy; he had not laboured
to do beautiful work in vain. He read over his
manuscript once more, and thought of the design-
ing of the pages. He made sketches on furtive
sheets of paper, and hunted up books in his father's
library for suggestions. There were books about
architecture, and mediaeval iron work, and brasses
which contributed hints for ornament; and not con-
tent with mere pictures he sought in the woods and
hedges, scanning the strange forms of trees, and
the poisonous growth of great water-plants, and

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the parasite twining of honeysuckle and briony.
In one of these rambles he discovered a red earth
which he made into a pigment, and he found in the
unctuous juice of a certain fern an ingredient which
he thought made his black ink still more glossy.
His book was written all in symbols, and in the
same spirit of symbolism he decorated it, causing
wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and
showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers,
with emblems of strange creatures, caught and
bound in rose thickets. All was dedicated to love
and a lover's madness, and there were songs in it
which haunted him with their lilt and refrain.
When the book was finished it replaced the loose
leaves as his constant companion by day and night.
Three times a day he repeated his ritual to him-
self, seeking out the loneliest places in the woods,
or going up to his room; and from the fixed intent-
ness and rapture of his gaze, the father thought
him still severely employed in the questionable proc-
ess of composition. At night he contrived to wake
for his strange worship; and he had a peculiar cere-
mony when he got up in the dark and lit his candle.
From a steep and wild hillside not far from the
house, he had cut from time to time five large
boughs of spiked and prickly gorse. He had
brought them into the house, one by one, and had
hidden them in the big box that stood beside his bed.
Often he woke up weeping and murmuring to him-

IOO

The Hill of Dreams

self the words of one of his songs, and then when
he had lit the candle, he would draw out the gorse-
boughs, and place them on the floor, and taking off
his night gown, gently lay himself down on the bed
of thorns and spines. Lying on his face, with the
candle and the book before him, he would softly
and tenderly repeat the praises of his dear, dear
Annie, and as he turned over page after page, and
saw the raised gold of the majuscules glow and
flame in the candle-light, he pressed the thorns into
his flesh. At such moments he tasted in all its
acute savour the joy of physical pain; and after two
or three experiences of such delights he altered his
book, making a curious sign in vermilion on the
margin of the passages where he was to inflict on
himself this sweet torture. Never did he fail to
wake at the appointed hour, a strong effort of will
broke through all the heaviness of sleep, and he
would rise up, joyful though weeping, and rev-
erently set his thorny bed upon the floor, offering
his pain with his praise. When he had whispered
the last word, and had risen from the ground, his
body would be all freckled with drops of blood; he
used to view the marks with pride. Here and there
a spine would be left deep in the flesh, and he would
pull these out roughly, tearing through the skin.
On some nights when he had pressed with more
fervour on the thorns his thighs would stream with
blood, red beads standing out on the flesh, and

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The Hill of Dreams

trickling down to his feet. He had some difficulty
in washing away the bloodstains so as not to leave
any traces to attract the attention of the servant;
and after a time he returned no more to his bed
when his duty had been accomplished. For a
coverlet he had a dark rug, a good deal worn, and
in this he would wrap his naked bleeding body, and
lie down on the hard floor, well content to add an
aching rest to the account of his pleasures. He
was covered with scars, and those that healed dur-
ing the day were torn open afresh at night; the pale
olive skin was red with the angry marks of blood,
and the graceful form of the young man appeared
like the body of a tortured martyr. He grew
thinner and thinner every day, for he ate but little ;
the skin was stretched on the bones of his face, and
the black eyes burnt in dark purple hollows. His
relations noticed that he was not looking well.

'Now, Lucian, it's perfect madness of you to go
on like this,' said Miss Deacon, one morning at
breakfast. 'Look how your hand shakes; some
people would say that you had been taking brandy.
And all that you want is a little medicine, and yet
you won't be advised. You know it's not my fault;
I have asked you to try Dr. Jelly's Cooling Powders
again and again.'

He remembered the forcible exhibition of the
powders when he was a boy, and felt thankful that
those days were over. He only grinned at his

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cousin and swallowed a great cup of strong tea to
steady his nerves which were shaky enough. Mrs.
Dixon saw him one day in Caermaen; it was very
hot, and he had been walking rather fast. The
scars on his body burnt and tingled and he tottered
as he raised his hat to the vicar's wife. She de-
cided without further investigation that he must
have been drinking in public-houses.

'It seems a mercy that poor Mrs. Taylor was
taken,' she said to her husband. 'She has certainly
been spared a great deal. That wretched young
man passed me this afternoon; he was quite intoxi-
cated.'

'How very sad,' said Mr. Dixon. 'A little port,
my dear?'

'Thank you, Merivale, I will have another glass
of sherry. Dr. Burrows is always scolding me and
saying that I must take something to keep up my
energy, and this sherry is so weak.'

The Dixons were not teetotallers. They re-
gretted it deeply, and blamed the doctor, who 'in-
sisted on some stimulant.' However, there was
some consolation in trying to convert the parish to
total abstinence, or, as they curiously called it,
temperance. Old women were warned of the sin
of taking a glass of beer for supper; aged labourers
were urged to try Cork-ho, the new temperance
drink; an uncouth beverage, styled coffee, was dis-
pensed at the reading-room. Mr. Dixon preached

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The Hill of Dreams

an eloquent 'temperance' sermon, soon after the
above conversation, taking as his text: Beware of
the leaven of the Pharisees. In his discourse he
showed that fermented liquor and leaven had much
in common, that beer was at the present day 'put
away' during Passover by the strict Jews ; and in a
moving peroration he urged his dear brethen, 'and
more especially those amongst us who are poor in
this world's goods,' to beware indeed of that evil
leaven which was sapping the manhood of our
nation. Mrs. Dixon cried after church:

'Oh, Merivale, what a beautiful sermon ! How
earnest you were. I hope it will do good.'

Mr. Dixon swallowed his port with great deco-
rum, but his wife fuddled herself every evening
with cheap sherry. She was quite unaware of the
fact, and sometimes wondered in a dim way why
she always had to scold the children after dinner.
And so strange things sometimes happened in the
nursery, and now and then the children looked
queerly at one another after a red-faced woman had
gone out, panting.

Lucian knew nothing of his accuser's trials, but
he was not long in hearing of his own intoxication.
The next time he went down to Caermaen he was
hailed by the doctor.

'Been drinking again to-day?'

'No,' said Lucian in a puzzled voice. 'What do
you mean?'

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'Oh, well, if you haven't, that's all right, as
you'll be able to take a drop with me. Come along
in?'

Over the whisky and pipes Lucian heard of the
evil rumours affecting his character.

'Mrs. Dixon assured me you were staggering
from one side of the street to the other. You quite
frightened her, she said. Then she asked me if I
recommended her to take one or two ounces of
spirit at bedtime for the palpitation; and of course
I told her two would be better. I have my living
to make here, you know. And upon my word, I
think she wants it; she's always gurgling inside like
a waterworks. I wonder how old Dixon can stand
it.'

'I like "ounces of spirit," ' said Lucian. 'That's
taking it medicinally, I suppose. I've often heard
of ladies who have to "take it medicinally"; and
that's how it's done?'

'That's it. "Dr. Burrows won't listen to me":
"I tell him how I dislike the taste of spirits, but he
says they are absolutely necessary for my constitu-
tion" : "my medical man insists on something at bed-
time"; that's the style.'

Lucian laughed gently; all these people had be-
come indifferent to him; he could no longer feel
savage indignation at their little hypocrisies and
malignancies. Their voices uttering calumny, and
morality, and futility had become like the thin shrill

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angry note of a gnat on a summer evening; he had
his own thoughts and his own life, and he passed
on without heeding.

'You come down to Caermaen pretty often don't
you?' said the doctor. 'I've seen you two or three
times in the last fortnight.'

'Yes, I enjoy the walk.'

'Well, look me up whenever you like, you know.
I am often in just at this time, and a chat with a
human being isn't bad, now and then. It's a change
for me : I'm often afraid I shall lose my patients.'

The doctor had the weakness of these terrible
puns, dragged headlong into the conversation. He
sometimes exhibited them before Mrs. Gervase,
who would smile in a faint and dignified manner,
and say:

'Ah, I see. Very amusing indeed. We had an
old coachman who was very clever, I believe, at
that sort of thing, but Mr. Gervase was obliged to
send him away, the laughter of the other domestics
was so very boisterous.'

Lucian laughed, not boisterously, but good-
humouredly, at the doctor's joke. He liked Bur-
rows, feeling that he was a man and not an auto-
matic gabbling machine.

'You look a little pulled down,' said the doctor,
when Lucian rose to go. 'No, you don't want any
medicine. Plenty of beef and beer will do you
more good than drugs. I daresay it's the hot

1 06

The Hill of Dreams

weather that has thinned you a bit. Oh, you'll be
all right again in a month.'

As Lucian strolled out of the town on his way
home, he passed a small crowd of urchins assem-
bled at the corner of an orchard. They were en-
joying themselves immensely. The 'healthy' boy,
the same whom he had seen some weeks ago operat-
ing on a cat, seemed to have recognised his selfish-
ness in keeping his amusements to himself. He
had found a poor lost puppy, a little creature with
bright pitiful eyes, almost human in their fond
friendly gaze. It was not a well-bred little dog;
it was certainly not that famous puppy 'by Vick out
of Wasp' ; it had rough hair and a foolish long tail
which it wagged beseechingly, at once deprecating
severity and asking kindness. The poor animal
had evidently been used to gentle treatment: it
would look up in a boy's face, and give a leap, fawn-
ing on him, and then bark in a small doubtful voice,
and cower a moment on the ground, astonished per-
haps at the strangeness, the bustle and animation.
The boys were beside themselves with eagerness;
there was quite a babble of voices, arguing, discuss-
ing, suggesting. Each one had a plan of his own
which he brought before the leader, a stout and
sturdy youth.

'Drown him! What be you thinkin' of, mun?'
he was saying. 'Tain't no sport at all. You shut
your mouth, gwaes. Be you goin' to ask your

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mother for the boiling water? Iss, Bob Williams,
I do know all that: but where be you a-going to get
the fire from? Be quiet, mun, can't you? Thomas
Trevor, be this dog yourn or mine? Now, look
you, if you don't all of you shut your bloody mouths,
I'll take the dog 'ome and keep him. There now!'

He was a born leader of men. A singular de-
pression and lowness of spirit showed itself on the
boys' faces. They recognised that the threat might
very possibly be executed, and their countenances
were at once composed to humble attention. The
puppy was still cowering on the ground in the midst
of them: one or two tried to relieve the tension of
their feelings by kicking him in the belly with their
hobnail boots. It cried out with the pain and
writhed a little, but the poor little beast did not
attempt to bite or even snarl. It looked up with
those beseeching friendly eyes at its persecutors,
and fawned on them again, and tried to wag its
tail and be merry, pretending to play with a straw
on the road, hoping perhaps to win a little favour
in that way.

The leader saw the moment for his master-stroke.
He slowly drew a piece of rope from his pocket.

'What do you say to that, mun? Now, Thomas
Trevor! We'll hang him over that there bough.
Will that suit you, Bobby Williams?'

There was a great shriek of approval and delight.
All was again bustle and animation. Til tie it

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round his neck?' 'Get out, mun, you don't know
how it be done.' 'Iss, I do, Charlie.' 'Now, let
me, gwaes, now do let me.' 'You be sure he won't
bite?' 'He bain't mad, be he?' 'Suppose we were
to tie up his mouth first?'

The puppy still fawned and curried favour, and
wagged that sorry tail, and lay down crouching on
one side on the ground, sad and sorry in his heart,
but still with a little gleam of hope, for now and
again he tried to play, and put up his face, praying
with those fond friendly eyes. And then at last
his gambols and poor efforts for mercy ceased, and
he lifted up his wretched voice in one long dismal
whine of despair. But he licked the hand of the
boy that tied the noose.

He was slowly and gently swung into the air as
Lucian went by unheeded; he struggled, and his
legs twisted and writhed. The 'healthy' boy pulled
the rope, and his friends danced and shouted with
glee. As Lucian turned the corner, the poor dan-
gling body was swinging to and fro ; the puppy was
dying, but he still kicked a little.

Lucian went on his way hastily, and shuddering
with disgust. The young of the human creature
were really too horrible; they defiled the earth, and
made existence unpleasant, as the pulpy growth of
a noxious and obscene fungus spoils an agreeable
walk. The sight of those malignant little animals
with mouths that uttered cruelty and filth, with

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hands dexterous in torture, and feet swift to run
all evil errands, had given him a shock and broken
up the world of strange thoughts in which he had
been dwelling. Yet it was no good being angry
with them: it was their nature to be very loathsome.
Only he wished they would go about their hideous
amusements in their own back gardens where no-
body could see them at work; it was too bad that he
should be interrupted and offended in a quiet
country road. He tried to put the incident out of
his mind, as if the whole thing had been a disagree-
able story, and the visions amongst which he wished
to move were beginning to return, when he was
again rudely disturbed. A little girl, a pretty child
of eight or nine, was coming along the lane to meet
him. She was crying bitterly and looking to left
and right, and calling out some word all the time.

'Jack, Jack, Jack! Little Jackie 1 Jack!'

Then she burst into tears afresh, and peered in-
to the hedge, and tried to peep through a gate into
a field.

'Jackie, Jackie, Jackie!'

She came up to Lucian, sobbing as if her heart
would break, and dropped him an old-fashioned
curtsy.

'Oh, please sir, have you seen my little Jackie?'

'What do you mean?' said Lucian. 'What is it
you've lost?'

'A little dog, please sir. A little tarrier dog with
no

The Hill of Dreams

white hair. Father gave me him a month ago, and
said I might keep him. Someone did leave the
garden gate open this afternoon, and he must 'a
got away, sir, and I was so fond of him sir, he was
so playful and loving, and I be afraid he be lost.'

She began to call again, without waiting for an
answer.

'Jack, Jack, Jack!'

'I'm afraid some boys have got your little dog,'
said Lucian. 'They've killed him. You'd better
go back home.'

He went on, walking as fast as he could, in his
endeavour to get beyond the noise of the child's
crying. It distressed him, and he wished to think
of other things. He stamped his foot angrily on
the ground as he recalled the annoyances of the
afternoon, and longed for some hermitage on the
mountains, far above the stench and the sound of
humanity.

A little farther, and he came to Croeswen, where
the road branched off to right and left. There was
a triangular plot of grass between the two roads;
there the cross had once stood, 'the goodly and
famous roode' of the old local chronicle. The words
echoed in Lucian's ears as he went by on the right
hand. 'There were five steps that did go up to the
first pace, and seven steps to the second pace, all of
clene hewn ashler. And all above it was most
curiously and gloriously wrought with thorowgh

III

The Hill of Dreams

carved work: in the highest place was the Holy
Roode with Christ upon the Cross having Marie on
the one syde and John on the other. And below
were six splendent and glisteringe archaungels that
bore up the roode, and beneath them in their stories
were the most fair and noble ymages of the xij
Apostles and of divers other Saints and Martirs.
And in the lowest storie there was a marvellous
ymagerie of divers Beasts, such as oxen and horses
and swine, and little dogs and peacocks, all done in
the finest and most curious wise, so that they all
seemed as if they were caught in a Wood of Thorns,
the which is their torment of this life. And here
once in the year was a marvellous solemn service,
when the parson of Caermaen came out with the
singers and all the people, singing the psalm Bene-
dicite omma opera as they passed along the road in
their procession. And when they stood at the
roode the priest did there his service, making cer-
tain prayers for the beasts, and then he went up to
the first pace and preached a sermon to the people,
shewing them that as our Lord Jhu dyed upon the
Tree of his deare mercy for us, so we too owe
mercy to the beasts his Creatures, for that they are
all his poor lieges and silly servants. And that like
as the Holy Aungells do their suit to him on high,
and the Blessed xij Apostles and the Martirs, and
all the Blissful Saints served him aforetime on earth
and now praise him in heaven, so also do the beasts

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The Hill of Dreams

serve him, though they be in torment of life and
below men. For their spirit goeth downward, as
Holy Writ teacheth us.'

It was a quaint old record, a curious relic of what
the modern inhabitants of Caermaen called the
Dark Ages. A few of the stones that had formed
the base of the cross still remained in position, grey
with age, blotched with black lichen and green moss.
The remainder of the famous rood had been used
to mend the roads, to build pigsties and domestic
offices; it had turned Protestant, in fact. Indeed,
if it had remained, the parson of Caermaen would
have had no time for the service; the coffee-stall,
the Portuguese Missions, the Society for the Con-
version of the Jews, and important social duties
took up all his leisure. Besides, he thought the
whole ceremony unscriptural.

Lucian passed on his way wondering at the
strange contrasts of the Middle Ages. How was
it that people who could devise so beautiful a service
believed in witchcraft, demoniacal possession and
obsession, in the incubus and the succubus, and in
the Sabbath and in many other horrible absurdities?
It seemed astonishing that anybody could even pre-
tend to credit such monstrous tales, but there could
be no doubt that the dread of old women who rode
on broomsticks and liked black cats was once a very
genuine terror.

A cold wind blew up from the river at sunset,

"3

The Hill of Dreams

and the scars on his body began to burn and tingle.
The pain recalled his ritual to him, and he began
to recite it as he walked along. He had cut a
branch of thorn from the hedge and placed it next
to his skin, pressing the spikes into the flesh with
his hand till the warm blood ran down. He felt
it was an exquisite and sweet observance for her
sake ; and then he thought of the secret golden palace
he was building for her, the rare and wonderful city
rising in his imagination. As the solemn night be-
gan to close about the earth, and the last glimmer
of the sun faded from the hills, he gave himself
anew to the woman, his body and his mind, all that
he was, and all that he had.

114

IV

IN the course of the week Lucian again visited
Caermaen. He wished to view the amphi-
theatre more precisely, to note the exact posi-
tion of the ancient walls, to gaze up the valley from
certain points within the town, to imprint minutely
and clearly on his mind the surge of the hills about
the city, and the dark tapestry of the hanging
woods. And he lingered in the museum where the
relics of the Roman occupation had been stored;
he was interested in the fragments of tessellated
floors, in the glowing gold of drinking cups, the
curious beads of fused and coloured glass, the
carved amber-work, the scent-flagons that still re-
tained the memory of unctuous odours, the neck-
laces, brooches, hairpins of gold and silver, and
other intimate objects which had once belonged to
Roman ladies. One of the glass flagons, buried in
damp earth for many hundred years, had gathered
in its dark grave all the splendours of the light, and
now shone like an opal with a moonlight glamour
and gleams of gold and pale sunset green, and im-
perial purple. Then there were the wine jars of
red earthenware, the memorial stones from graves,
and the heads of broken gods, with fragments of

"5

The Hill of Dreams

occult things used in the secret rites of Mithras.
Lucian read on the labels where all these objects
were found: in the churchyard, beneath the turf of
the meadow, and in the old cemetery near the
forest; and whenever it was possible he would make
his way to the spot of discovery, and imagine the
long darkness that had hidden gold and stone and
amber. All these investigations were necessary for
the scheme he had in view, so he became for some
time quite a familiar figure in the dusty deserted
streets and in the meadows by the river. His con-
tinual visits to Caermaen were a tortuous puzzle to
the inhabitants, who flew to their windows at the
sound of a step on the uneven pavements. They
were at a loss in their conjectures; his motive for
coming down three times a week must of course be
bad, but it seemed undiscoverable. And Lucian on
his side was at first a good deal put out by occasional
encounters with members of the Gervase or Dixon
or Colley tribes ; he had often to stop and exchange
a few conventional expressions, and such meetings,
casual as they were, annoyed and distracted him.
He was no longer infuriated or wounded by sneers
or contempt or by the cackling laughter of the
young people when they passed him on the road
(his hat was a shocking one and his untidiness ter-
rible), but such incidents were unpleasant just as the
smell of a drain was unpleasant, and threw the
strange mechanism of his thoughts out of gear for

;n6

The Hill of Dreams

the time. Then he had been disgusted by the affair
of the boys and the little dog; the loathsomeness of
it had quite broken up his fancies. He had read
books of modern occultism, and remembered some
of the experiments described. The adept, it was
alleged, could transfer the sense of consciousness
from the brain to the foot or hand, he could anni-
hilate the world around him and pass into another
sphere. Lucian wondered whether he could not
perform some such operation for his own benefit.
Human beings were constantly annoying him and
geting in his way; was it not possible to annihilate
the race, or at all events to reduce them to wholly
insignificant forms? A certain process suggested
itself to his mind, a work partly mental and partly
physical, and after two or three experiments he
found to his astonishment and delight that it was
successful. Here, he thought, he had discovered
one of the secrets of true magic, this was the key to
the symbolic transmutations of the eastern tales.
The adept could, in truth, change those who were
obnoxious to him into harmless and unimportant
shapes, not as in the letter of the old stories, by
transforming the enemy, but by transforming him-
self. The magician puts men below him by going
up higher, as one looks down on a mountain city
from a loftier crag. The stones on the road and
such petty obstacles do not trouble the wise man on
the great journey, and so Lucian when obliged to

The Hill of Dreams

stop and converse with his fellow-creatures, to listen
to their poor pretences and inanities, was no more
inconvenienced than when he had to climb an awk-
ward stile in the course of a walk. As for the more
unpleasant manifestations of humanity: after all
they no longer concerned him. Men intent on the
great purpose did not suffer the current of their
thoughts to be broken by the buzzing of a fly
caught in a spider's web, so why should he be per-
turbed by the misery of a puppy in the hands of
village boys? The fly, no doubt, endured its tor-
tures ; lying helpless and bound in those slimy bands,
it cried out in its thin voice when the claws of the
horrible monster fastened on it; but its dying
agonies had never vexed the reverie of a lover.
Lucian saw no reason why the boys should offend
him more than the spider, or why he should pity the
dog more than he pitied the fly. The talk of men
and women might be wearisome and inept and often
malignant; but he could not imagine an alchemist
at the moment of success, a general in the hour of
victory, or a financier with a gigantic scheme of
swindling well on the market being annoyed by the
buzz of insects. The spider is, no doubt, a very
terrible brute with a hideous mouth and hairy tiger-
like claws when seen through the microscope; but
Lucian had taken away the microscope from his eyes.
He could now walk the streets of Caermaen confi-
dent and secure, without any dread of interruption^

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for at a moment's notice the transformation could
be effected. Once Dr. Burrows caught him and
made him promise to attend a bazaar that was to
be held in aid of the Hungarian Protestants ; Lucian
assented the more willingly as he wished to pay a
visit to certain curious mounds on a hill a little way
out of the town, and he calculated on slinking off
from the bazaar early in the afternoon. Lord
Beamys was visiting Sir Vivian Ponsonby, a local
magnate, and had kindly promised to drive over
and declare the bazaar open. It was a solemn mo-
ment when the carriage drew up and the great man
alighted. He was rather an evil-looking old noble-
man, but the clergy and gentry, their wives and sons
and daughters welcomed him with a great and
unctuous joy. Conversations were broken off in
mid-sentence, slow people gaped, not realising why
their friends had so suddenly left them, the Mey-
ricks came up hot and perspiring in fear lest they
should be too late, Miss Colley, a yellow virgin of
austere regard, smiled largely, Mrs. Dixon beck-
oned wildly with her parasol to the 'girls' who
were idly strolling in a distant part of the field, and
the archdeacon ran at full speed. The air grew
dark with bows, and resonant with the genial laugh
of the archdeacon, the cackle of the younger ladies,
and the shrill parrot-like voices of the matrons;
those smiled who had never smiled before, and on
some maiden faces there hovered that look of ador-

The Hill of Dreams

ing ecstasy with which the old masters graced their
angels. Then, when all the due rites had been per-
formed the company turned and began to walk to-
wards the booths of their small Vanity Fair. Lord
Beamys led the way with Mrs. Gervase, Mrs. Dixon
followed with Sir Vivian Ponsonby, and the multi-
tudes that followed cried, saying, 'What a dear old
man!' — 'Isn't it kind of him to come all this way?'
— 'What a sweet expression, isn't it?' — 'I think
he's an old love' — 'One of the good old sort' — 'Real
English nobleman' — 'Oh most correct, I assure you ;
if a girl gets into trouble, notice to quit at once' —
'Always stands by the Church' — 'Twenty livings in
his gift' — 'Voted for the Public Worship Regula-
tion Act' — 'Ten thousand acres strictly preserved.'
The old lord was leering pleasantly and muttering
to himself : 'Some fine gals here. Like the looks of
that filly with the pink hat. Ought to see more of
her. She'd give Lotty points.'

The pomp swept slowly across the grass: the
archdeacon had got hold of Mr. Dixon, and they
were discussing the misdeeds of some clergyman in
the rural deanery.

'I can scarce credit it,' said Mr. Dixon.

'Oh, I assure you, there can be no doubt. We
have witnesses. There can be no question that
there was a procession at Llanfihangel on the Sun-
day before Easter; the choir and minister went

1 2O

The Hill of Dreams

round the church, carrying palm branches in their
hands.'

'Very shocking.'

'It has distressed the bishop. Martin is a hard-
working man enough, and all that, but those sort
of things can't be tolerated. The bishop told me
that he had set his face against processions.'

'Quite right: the bishop is perfectly right. Pro-
cessions are unscriptural.'

'It's the thin end of the wedge, you know, Dixon.'

'Exactly. I have always resisted anything of
the kind here.'

'Right. Principiis obsta, you know. Martin is
so imprudent. There's a way of doing things.'

The 'scriptural' procession led by Lord Beamys
broke up when the stalls were reached and gathered
round the nobleman as he declared the bazaar open.

Lucian was sitting on a garden-seat, a little dis-
tance off, looking dreamily before him. And all
that he saw was a swarm of flies clustering and
buzzing about a lump of tainted meat that lay on
the grass. The spectacle in no way interrupted the
harmony of his thoughts, and soon after the open-
ing of the bazaar he went quietly away, walking
across the fields in the direction of the ancient
mounds he desired to inspect.

All these journeys of his to Caermaen and its
neighbourhood had a peculiar object; he was grad-

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ually levelling to the dust the squalid kraals of mod-
ern times, and rebuilding the splendid and golden
city of Siluria. All this mystic town was for the
delight of his sweetheart and himself; for her the
wonderful villas, the shady courts, the magic of
tessellated pavements, and the hangings of rich
stuffs with their intricate and glowing patterns.
Lucian wandered all day through the shining streets,
taking shelter sometimes in the gardens beneath the
dense and gloomy ilex trees, and listening to the
plash and trickle of the fountains. Sometimes he
would look out of a window and watch the crowd
and colour of the market-place, and now and again
a ship came up the river bringing exquisite silks and
the merchandise of unknown lands in the Far East.
He had made a curious and accurate map of the
town he proposed to inhabit, in which every villa
was set down and named. He drew his lines to
scale with the gravity of a surveyor, and studied the
plan till he was able to find his way from house to
house on the darkest summer night. On the south-
ern slopes about the town there were vineyards, al-
ways under a glowing sun, and sometimes he ven-
tured to the furthest ridge of the forest, where the
wild people still lingered, that he might catch the
golden gleam of the city far away, as the light quiv-
ered and scintillated on the glittering tiles. And
there were gardens outside the city gates where
strange and brilliant flowers grew, filling the hot air

122

The Hill of Dreams

with their odour, and scenting the breeze that blew
along the streets. The dull modern life was far
away, and people who saw him at this period won-
dered what was amiss; the abstraction of his glance
was obvious, even to eyes not over-sharp. But men
and women had lost all their power of annoyance
and vexation; they could no longer even interrupt
his thought for a moment. He could listen to Mr.
Dixon with apparent attention, while he was in re-
ality enraptured by the entreating music of the
double flute, played by a girl in the garden of Aval-
launius, for that was the name he had taken. Mr.
Dixon was innocently discoursing archaeology, giv-
ing a brief resume of the views expressed by Mr.
Wyndham at the last meeting of the antiquarian
society.

'There can be no doubt that the temple of Diana
stood there in pagan times,' he concluded, and
Lucian assented to the opinion, and asked a few
questions which seemed pertinent enough. But all
the time the flute notes were sounding in his ears,
and the ilex threw a purple shadow on the white
pavement before his villa. A boy came forward
from the garden; he had been walking amongst the
vines and plucking the ripe grapes, and the juice
had trickled down over his breast. Standing beside
the girl, unashamed in the sunlight, he began to sing
one of Sappho's love songs. His voice was as full
and rich as a woman's, but purged of all emotion,

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The Hill of Dreams

he was an instrument of music in the flesh.
Lucian looked at him steadily; the white perfect
body shone against the roses and the blue of the
sky, clear and gleaming as marble in the glare of
the sun. The words he sang burned and flamed
with passion, and he was as unconscious of their
meaning as the twin pipes of the flute. And the
girl was smiling. The vicar shook hands and went
on, well pleased with his remarks on the temple of
Diana and also with Lucian's polite interest.

'He is by no means wanting in intelligence,' he
said to his family. 'A little curious in manner, per-
haps, but not stupid.'

'Oh, papa,' said Henrietta, 'don't you think he
is rather silly? He can't talk about anything —
anything interesting, I mean. And he pretends to
know a lot about books, but I heard him say the
other day he had never read The Prince of the
House of David or Ben-Hur. Fancy I'

The vicar had not interrupted Lucian. The sun
still beat upon the roses, and a little breeze bore
the scent to his nostrils together with the smell of
grapes and vine-leaves. He had become curious
in sensation, and as he leant back upon the cushions
covered with glistening yellow silk, he was trying to
analyse a strange ingredient in the perfume of the
air. He had penetrated far beyond the crude dis-
tinctions of modern times, beyond the rough:
'there's a smell of roses,' 'there must be sweetbriar

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The Hill of Dreams

somewhere.' Modern perceptions of odour were,
he knew, far below those of the savage in delicacy.
The degraded black fellow of Australia could dis-
tinguish odours in a way that made the consumer
of 'damper' stare in amazement, but the savage's
sensations were all strictly utilitarian. To Lucian
as he sat in the cool porch, his feet on the marble,
the air came laden with scents as subtly and wonder-
fully interwoven and contrasted as the harmonies
of a great master. The stained marble of the
pavement gave a cool reminiscence of the Italian
mountain, the blood-red roses palpitating in the sun-
light sent out an odour mystical as passion itself,
and there was the hint of inebriation in the perfume
of the trellised vines. Besides these, the girl's de-
sire and the unripe innocence of the boy were as
distinct as benzoin and myrrh, both delicious and
exquisite, and exhaled as freely as the scent of the
roses. But there was another element that puz-
zled him, an aromatic suggestion of the forest.
He understood it at last; it was the vapour of the
great red pines that grew beyond the garden; their
spicy needles were burning in the sun, and the smell
was as fragrant as the fume of incense blown from
far. The soft entreaty of the flute and the swell-
ing rapture of the boy's voice beat on the air to-
gether, and Lucian wondered whether there were in
the nature of things any true distinction between
the impressions of sound and scent and colour.

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The violent blue of the sky, the song, and the odours
seemed rather varied symbols of one mystery than
distinct entities. He could almost imagine that the
boy's innocence was indeed a perfume, and that the
palpitating roses had become a sonorous chant.

In the curious silence which followed the last
notes, when the boy and girl had passed under the
purple ilex shadow, he fell into a reverie. The
fancy that sensations are symbols and not realities
hovered in his mind, and led him to speculate as to
whether they could not actually be transmuted one
into another. It was possible, he thought, that a
whole continent of knowledge had been undis-
covered; the energies of men having been expended
in unimportant and foolish directions. Modern in-
genuity had been employed on such trifles as locomo-
tive engines, electric cables, and cantilever bridges;
on elaborate devices for bringing uninteresting
people nearer together; the ancients had been al-
most as foolish, because they had mistaken the sym-
bol for the thing signified. It was not the material
banquet which really mattered, but the thought of
it; it was almost as futile to eat and take emetics
and eat again as to invent telephones and high-
pressure boilers. As for some other ancient meth-
ods of enjoying life, one might as well set oneself to
improve calico printing at once.

'Only in the garden of Avallaunius,' said Lucian
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The Hill of Dreams

to himself, 'is the true and exquisite science to be
found.'

He could imagine a man who was able to live in
one sense while he pleased; to whom, for example,
every impression of touch, taste, hearing, or seeing
should be translated into odour; who at the desired
kiss should be ravished with the scent of dark
violets, to whom music should be the perfume of a
rose-garden at dawn.

When, now and again, he voluntarily resumed
the experience of common life, it was that he might
return with greater delight to the garden in the city
refuge. In the actual world the talk was of Non-
conformists, the lodger franchise, and the Stock
Exchange; people were constantly reading news-
papers, drinking Australian Burgundy, and doing
other things equally absurd. They either looked
shocked when the fine art of pleasure was mentioned,
or confused it with going to musical comedies,
drinking bad whisky, and keeping late hours in dis-
reputable and vulgar company. He found to his
amusement that the profligate were by many degrees
duller than the pious, but that the most tedious of
all were the persons who preached promiscuity, and
called their system of 'pigging' the 'New Morality.'

He went back to the city lovingly, because it was
built and adorned for his love. As the metaphy-
sicians insist on the consciousness of the ego as the

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The Hill of Dreams

implied basis of all thought, so he knew that it was
she in whom he had found himself, and through
whom and for whom all the true life existed. He
felt that Annie had taught him the rare magic which
had created the garden of Avallaunius. It was for
her that he sought strange secrets and tried to pene-
trate the mysteries of sensation, for he could only
give her wonderful thoughts and a wonderful life,
and a poor body stained with the scars of his wor-
ship.

It was with this object, that of making the of-
fering of himself a worthy one, that he continually
searched for new and exquisite experiences. He
made lovers come before him and confess their
secrets; he pried into the inmost mysteries of inno-
cence and shame, noting how passion and reluctance
strive together for the mastery. In the ampitheatre
he sometimes witnessed strange entertainments in
which such tales as Daphnis and Chloe and The
Golden Ass were performed before him. These
shows were always given at night-time; a circle of
torchbearers surrounded the stage in the centre, and
above, all the tiers of seats were dark. He would
look up at the soft blue of the summer sky, and at
the vast dim mountain hovering like a cloud in the
west, and then at the scene illumined by a flaring
light, and contrasted with violent shadows. The
subdued mutter of conversation in a strange lan-
guage rising from bench after bench, swift hissing

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The Hill of Dreams

whispers of explanation, now and then a shout or a
cry as the interest deepened, the restless tossing of
the people as the end drew near, an arm lifted, a
cloak thrown back, the sudden blaze of a torch
lighting up purple or white or the gleam of gold in
the black serried ranks; these were impressions that
seemed always amazing. And above, the dusky
light of the stars, around, the sweet-scented mead-
ows, and the twinkle of lamps from the still city, the
cry of the sentries about the walls, the wash of the
tide filling the river, and the salt savour of the sea.
With such a scenic ornament he saw the tale of Apu-
leius represented, heard the names of Fotis and
Byrrhaena and Lucius proclaimed, and the deep in-
tonation of such sentences as Ecce Veneris hortator
et armiger Liber advenlt ultra. The tale went on
through all its marvellous adventures, and Lucian
left the ampitheatre and walked beside the river
where he could hear indistinctly the noise of voices
and the singing Latin, and note how the rumour of
the stage mingled with the murmur of the shudder-
ing reeds and the cool lapping of the tide. Then
came the farewell of the cantor, the thunder of ap-
plause, the crash of cymbals, the calling of the flutes,
and the surge of the wind in the great dark wood.
At other times it was his chief pleasure to spend
a whole day in a vineyard planted on the steep slope
beyond the bridge. A grey stone seat had been
placed beneath a shady laurel, and here he often sat

129

The Hill of Dreams

without motion or gesture for many hours. Below
him the tawny river swept round the town in a half
circle; he could see the swirl of the yellow water,
its eddies and minature whirlpools, as the tide
poured up from the south. And beyond the river
the strong circuit of the walls, and within, the city
glittered like a charming piece of mosaic. He freed
himself from the obtuse modern view of towns as
places where human beings live and make money and
rejoice or suffer, for from the standpoint of the mo-
ment such facts were wholly impertinent. He knew
perfectly well that for his present purpose the tawny
sheen and shimmer of the tide was the only fact of
importance about the river, and so he regarded the
city as a curious work in jewellery. Its radiant
marble porticoes, the white walls of the villas, a
dome of burning copper, the flash and scintillation
of tiled roofs, the quiet red of brickwork, dark
groves of ilex, and cypress, and laurel, glowing rose-
gardens, and here and there the silver of a fountain,
seemed arranged and contrasted with a wonderful
art, and the town appeared a delicious ornament,
every cube of colour owing its place to the thought
and inspiration of the artificer. Lucian, as he gazed
from his arbour amongst the trellised vines, lost
none of the subtle pleasures of the sight; noting
every nuance of colour, he let his eyes dwell for a
moment on the scarlet flash of poppies, and then
on a glazed roof which in the glance of the sun

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The Hill of Dreams

seemed to spout white fire. A square of vines was
like some rare green stone ; the grapes were massed
so richly amongst the vivid leaves, that even from
far off there was a sense of irregular flecks and
stains of purple running through the green. The
laurel garths were like cool jade; the gardens, where
red, yellow, blue and white gleamed together in a
mist of heat, had the radiance of opal; the river
was a band of dull gold. On every side, as if to en-
hance the preciousness of the city, the woods hung
dark on the hills ; above, the sky was violet, specked
with minute feathery clouds, white as snowflakes.
It reminded him of a beautiful bowl in his villa;
the ground was of that same brilliant blue, and the
artist had fused into the work when it was hot par-
ticles of pure white glass.

For Lucian this was a spectacle that enchanted
many hours; leaning on one hand, he would gaze
at the city glowing in the sunlight till the purple
shadows grew down the slopes and the long melo-
dious trumpet sounded for the evening watch.
Then, as he strolled beneath the trellises, he would
see all the radiant facets glimmering out, and the
city faded into haze, a white wall shining here and
there, and the gardens veiled in a dim, rich glow.
On such an evening he would go home with the
sense that he had truly lived a day, having received
for many hours the most acute impressions of
beautiful colour.

The Hill of Dreams

Often he spent the night in the cool court of his
villa lying amidst soft cushions heaped upon the
marble bench. A lamp stood on the table at his el-
bow, its light making the water in the cistern
twinkle. There was no sound in the court except the
soft continual plashing of the fountain. Through-
out these still hours he would meditate, and he be-
came more than ever convinced that man could, if
he pleased, become lord of his own sensations.
This, surely, was the true meaning concealed under
the beautiful symbolism of alchemy. Some years be-
fore he had read many of the wonderful alchemical
books of the later Middle Ages, and had suspected
that something other than the turning of lead into
gold was intended. This impression was deepened
when he looked into Lumen de Lumine by Vaughan,
the brother of the Silurist, and he had long puzzled
himself in the endeavour to find a reasonable inter-
pretation of the hermetic mystery, and of the red
powder, 'glistering and glorious as the sun.' And
the solution shone out at last, bright and amazing,
as he lay quiet in the court of Avallaunius.

He knew that he himself had solved the riddle,
that he held in his hand the powder of projection,
the philosopher's stone transmuting all it touched
to fine gold; the gold of exquisite impressions.
He understood now something of the alchemical
symbolism; the crucible and the furnace, the 'Green
Dragon,' and the 'Son Blessed of the Fire' had, he

132

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saw, a peculiar meaning. He understood too why
the uninitiated were warned of the terror and danger
through which they must pass; and the vehemence
with which the adepts disclaimed all desire for ma-
terial riches no longer struck him as singular. The
wise man does not endure the torture of the fur-
nace in order that he may be able to compete with
operators in pork and company promoters; neither
a steam yacht, nor a grouse-moor, nor three liveried
footmen would add at all to his gratifications.
Again Lucian said to himself:

'Only in the court of Avallaunius is the true
science of the exquisite to be found.'

He saw the true gold into which the beggarly
matter of existence may be transmuted by spagyric
art; a succession of delicious moments, all the rare
flavours of life concentrated, purged of their lees,
and preserved in a beautiful vessel. The moonlight
fell green on the fountain and on the curious pave-
ments, and in the long sweet silence of the night he
lay still and felt that thought itself was an acute
pleasure, to be expressed perhaps in terms of odour
or colour by the true artist.

And he gave himself other and even stranger
gratifications. Outside the city walls, between the
baths and the amphitheatre, was a tavern, a place
where wonderful people met to drink wonderful
wine. There he saw priests of Mithras and Isis
and of more occult rites from the East, men who

'33

. The Hill of Dreams

wore robes of bright colours, and grotesque orna-
ments, symbolising secret things. They spoke
amongst themselves in a rich jargon of coloured
words, full of hidden meanings and the sense of
matters unintelligible to the uninitiated, alluding to
what was concealed beneath roses, and calling each
other by strange names. And there were actors
who gave the shows in the amphitheatre, officers
of the legion who had served in wild places, singers,
and dancing girls, and heroes of strange adventure.

The walls of the tavern were covered with
pictures painted in violent hues; blues and reds and
greens jarring against one another and lighting up
the gloom of the place. The stone benches were
always crowded, the sunlight cany in through the
door in a long bright beam, casting^faancing shadow
of vine leaves on the further wall. There a painter
had made a joyous figure of the young Bacchus
driving the leopards before him with his ivy-staff,
and the quivering shadow seemed a part of the
picture. The room was cool and dark and cavern-
ous, but the scent and heat of the summer gushed
In through the open door. There was ever a full
sound, with noise and vehemence, there, and the
rolling music of the Latin tongue never ceased.

'The wine of the siege, the wine that we saved,'
cried one.

'Look for the jar marked Faunus; you will be
glad.'

'34

The Hill of Dreams

'Bring me the wine of the Owl's Face.'
'Let us have the wine of Saturn's Bridge.'
The boys who served brought the wine in dull red
jars that struck a charming note against their white
robes. They poured out the violet and purple and
golden wine with calm sweet faces as if they were
assisting in the mysteries, without any sign that they
heard the strange words that flashed from side to
side. The cups were all of glass : some were of
deep green, of the colour of the sea near the land,
flawed and specked with the bubbles of the furnace.
Others were of brilliant scarlet, streaked with ir-
regular bands of white, and having the appearance
of white globules in the moulded stem. There were
cups of dark glowing blue, deeper and more shining
than the -blue of the sky, and running through the
substance of the glass were veins of rich gamboge
yellow, twining from the brim to the foot. Some
cups were of a troubled and clotted red, with alter-
nating blotches of dark and light, some were varie-
gated with white and yellow stains, some wore a
film of rainbow colors, some glittered, shot with
gold threads through the clear crystal, some were
as if sapphires hung suspended in running water,
some sparkled with the glint of stars, some were
black and golden like the tortoiseshell.

A strange feature was the constant and flutter-
ing motion of hands and arms. Gesture made a
constant commentary on speech; white fingers,

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The Hill of Dreams

whiter arms, and sleeves of all colours, hovered
restlessly, appeared and disappeared with an effect
of threads crossing and recrossing on the loom.
And the odour of the place was both curious and
memorable; something of the damp cold breath of
the cave meeting the hot blast of summer, the
strangely mingled aromas of rare wines as they fell
plashing and ringing into the cups, the drugged va-
pour of the East that the priests of Mithras and
Isis bore from their steaming temples; these were
always strong and dominant. And the women were
scented, sometimes with unctuous and overpower-
ing perfumes, and to the artist the experiences of
those present were hinted in subtle and delicate
nuances of odour

They drank their wine and caressed all day in
the tavern. The women threw their round white
arms about their lover's necks, they intoxicated them
with the scent of their hair, the priests muttered
their fantastic jargon of Theurgy. And through
the sonorous clash of voices there always seemed
the ring of the cry:

'Look for the jar marked Faunus; you will be
glad.'

Outside, the vine tendrils shook on the white
walls glaring in the sunshine; the breeze swept up
from the yellow river, pungent with the salt sea
savour.

These tavern scenes were often the subject of
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The Hill of Dreams

Lucian's meditation as he sat amongst the cushions
on the marble seat. The rich sound of the voices
impressed him above all things, and he saw that
words have a far higher reason than the utilitarian
office of imparting a man's thought. The com-
mon notion that language and linked words are im-
portant only as a means of expression he found a
little ridiculous; as if electricity were to be studied
solely with the view of 'wiring' to people, and all its
other properties left unexplored, neglected. Lan-
guage, he understood, was chiefly important for the
beauty of its sounds, by its possession of words res-
onant, glorious to the ear, by its capacity, when ex-
quisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and in-
definable impressions, perhaps more ravishing and
farther removed from the domain of strict thought
than the impressions excited by music itself. Here
lay hidden the secret of the sensuous art of liter-
ature, it was the secret of suggestion, the art of
causing delicious sensation by the use of words. In
a way, therefore, literature was independent of
thought; the mere English listener, if he had an ear
attuned, could recognise the beauty of a splendid
Latin phrase.

Here was the explanation of the magic of Lycidas.
From the standpoint of the formal understanding
it was an effected lament over some wholly uninter-
esting and unimportant Mr. King; it was full of non-
sense about 'shepherds' and 'flocks' and 'muses' and

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such stale stock of poetry; the introduction of St.
Peter on a stage thronged with nymphs and river
gods was blasphemous, absurd, and, in the worst
taste, there were touches of greasy Puritanism, the
twang of the conventicle was only too apparent.
And Lycidas was probably the most perfect piece
of pure literature in existence; because every word
and phrase and line were sonorous, ringing and
echoing with music.

'Literature,' he re-enunciated in his mind, 'is the
sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by
means of words.'

And yet there was something more; besides the
logical thought, which was often a hindrance, a
troublesome though inseparable accident, besides
the sensation, always a pleasure and a delight, be-
sides these there were the indefinable inexpressible
images which all fine literature summons to the mind.
As the chemist in his experiments is sometimes
astonished to find unknown, unexpected elements in
the crucible or the receiver, as the world of material
things is considered by some a thin veil of the im-
material universe, so he who reads wonderful prose
or verse is conscious of suggestions that cannot be
put into words, which do not rise from the logical
sense, which are rather parallel to than connected
with the sensuous delight. The world so disclosed
is rather the world of dreams, rather the world in
which children sometimes live, instantly appearing,

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and instantly vanishing away, a world beyond all ex-
pression or analysis, neither of the intellect nor of
the senses. He called these fancies of his 'Med-
itations of a Tavern,' and was amused to think that
a theory of letters should have risen from the elo-
quent noise that rang all day about the violet and
golden wine.

'Let us seek for more exquisite things,' said
Lucian to himself. He could almost imagine the
magic transmutation of the senses accomplished, the
strong sunlight was an odour in his nostrils; it
poured down on the white marble and the palpitat-
ing roses like a flood. The sky was a glorious blue,
making the heart joyous, and the eyes could rest in
the dark green leaves and purple shadow of the ilex.
The earth seemed to burn and leap beneath the sun,
he fancied he could see the vine tendrils stir and
quiver in the heat, and the faint fume of the scorch-
ing pine needles was blown across the gleaming gar-
den to the seat beneath the porch. Wine was be-
fore him in a cup of carved amber; a wine of the
colour of a dark rose, with a glint as of a star or of
a jet of flame deep beneath the brim; and the cup
was twined about with a delicate wreath of ivy. He
was often loath to turn away from the still contem-
plation of such things, from the mere joy of the
violent sun, and the responsive earth. He loved his
garden and the view of the tessellated city from the
vineyard on the hill, the strange clamour of the

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tavern, and white Fotis appearing on the torch-lit
stage. And there were shops in the town in which
he delighted, the shops of the perfume makers, and
jewellers, and dealers in curious ware. He loved
to see all things made for ladies' use, to touch the
gossamer silks that were to touch their bodies, to
finger the beads of amber and the gold chains which
would stir above their hearts, to handle the carved
hairpins and brooches, to smell odours which were
already dedicated to love.

But though these were sweet and delicious grati-
fications, he knew that there were more exquisite
things of which he might be a spectator. He had
seen the folly of regarding fine literature from the
standpoint of the logical intellect, and he now be-
gan to question the wisdom of looking at life as if
it were a moral representation. Literature, he
knew, could not exist without some meaning, and
considerations of right and wrong were to a certain
extent inseparable from the conception of life, but
to insist on ethics as the chief interest of the human
pageant was surely absurd. One might as well read
Lycidas for the sake of its denunciation of 'our cor-
rupted Clergy,' or Homer for 'manners and cus-
toms.' An artist entranced by landscape did not
greatly concern himself with the geological form-
ation of the hills, nor did the lover of a wild sea
inquire as to the chemical analysis of the water.
Lucian saw a coloured and complex life displayed

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before him, and he sat enraptured at the spectacle,
not concerned to know whether actions were good
or bad, but content if they were curious.

In this spirit he made a singular study of corrup-
tion. Beneath his feet, as he sat in the garden
porch, was a block of marble through which there
ran a scarlet stain. It began with a faint line, thin
as a hair, and grew as it advanced, sending out off-
shoots to right and left, and broadening to a pool
of brilliant red. There were strange lives into
which he looked that were like the block of marble;
women with grave sweet faces told him the astound-
ing tale of their adventures, and how, as they said,
they had met the faun when they were little chil-
dren. They told him how they had played and
watched by the vines and the fountains, and dallied
with the nymphs, and gazed at images reflected in
the water pools, till the authentic face appeared
from the wood. He heard others tell how they
had loved the satyrs for many years before they
knew their race; and there were strange stones of
those who had longed to speak but knew not the
word of the enigma, and searched in all strange
paths and ways before they found it.

He heard the history of the woman who fell in
love with her slave-boy, and tempted him for three
years in vain. He heard the tale from the woman's
full red lips, and watched her face, full of the in-
effable sadness of lust as she described her curious

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strategems in mellow phrases. She was drinking
a sweet yellow wine from a gold cup as she spoke,
and the odour in her hair and the aroma of the
precious wine seemed to mingle with the soft
strange words that flowed like an unguent from a
carven jar. She told how she bought the boy in the
market of an Asian city, and had him carried to
her house in the grove of fig-trees. 'Then,' she
went on, 'he was led into my presence as I sat be-
tween the columns of my court. A blue veil was
spread above to shut out the heat of the sun, and
rather twilight than light shone on the painted
walls, and the wonderful colours of the pavement,
and the images of Love and the Mother of Love.
The men who brought the boy gave him over to my
girls, who undressed him before me, one drawing
gently away his robe, another stroking his brown
and flowing hair, another praising the whiteness of
his limbs, and another caressing him, and speaking
loving words in his ear. But the boy looked sul-
lenly at them all, striking away their hands, and
pouting with his lovely and splendid lips, and I saw
a blush, like the rosy veil of dawn, reddening his
body and his cheeks. Then I made them bathe
him, and anoint him with scented oils from head to
foot, till his limbs shone and glistened with the
gentle and mellow glow of an ivory statue. Then
I said: "You are bashful, because you shine alone
amongst us all; see, we too will be your fellows."

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The girls began first of all, fondling and kissing one
another, and doing for each other the offices of wait-
ing maids. They drew out the pins and loosened the
bands of their hair, and I never knew before that
they were so lovely. The soft and shining tresses
flowed down, rippling like the sea waves; some had
hair golden and radiant as this wine in my cup, the
faces of others appeared amidst the blackness of
ebony; there were locks that seemed of burnished
and scintillating copper, some glowed with hair of
tawny splendour, and others were crowned with the
brightness of the sardonyx. Then, laughing, and
without the appearance of shame, they unfastened
the brooches and the bands that sustained their
robes, and so allowed silk and linen to flow swiftly to
the stained floor, so that one would have said there
was a sudden apparition of the fairest nymphs.
With many festive and jocose words they began to
incite each other to mirth, praising the beauties
that shone on every side, and calling the boy by a
girl's name, they invited him to be their playmate.
But he refused, shaking his head, and still stand-
ing dumbfounded and abashed, as if he saw a for-
bidden and terrible spectacle. Then I ordered the
women to undo my hair and my clothes, making
them caress me with the tenderness of the fondest
lover, but without avail, for the foolish boy still
scowled and pouted out his lips, stained with an
imperial and glorious scarlet.'

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She poured out more of the topaz-coloured wine
in her cup, and Lucian saw it glitter as it rose to
the brim and mirrored the gleam of the lamps.
The tale went on, recounting a hundred strange de-
vices. The woman told how she had tempted the
boy by idleness and ease, giving him long hours of
sleep, and allowing him to recline all day on soft
cushions, that swelled about him, enclosing his body.
She tried the experiment of curious odours: caus-
ing him to smell always about him the oil of roses,
and burning in his presence rare gums from the
East. He was allured by soft dresses, being
clothed in silks that caressed the skin with the sense
of a fondling touch. Three times a day they
spread before him a delicious banquet, full of
savour and odour and colour; three times a day they
endeavoured to intoxicate him with delicate wine.

'And so,' the lady continued, 'I spared nothing to
catch him in the glistering nets of love ; taking only
sour and contemptuous glances in return. And at
last in an incredible shape I won the victory, and
then, having gained a green crown fighting in agony
against his green and crude immaturity, I devoted
him to the theatre, where he amused the people by
the splendour of his death.'

On another evening he heard the history of the
man who dwelt alone, refusing all allurenments, and
was at last discovered to be the lover of a black
statue. And there were tales of strange cruelties,

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of men taken by mountain robbers, and curiously
maimed and disfigured, so that when they escaped
and returned to the town, they were thought to be
monsters and killed at their own doors. Lucian
left no dark or secret nook of life unvisited; he sat
down, as he said, at the banquet resolved to taste
all the savours, and to leave no flagon unvisited.

His relations grew seriously alarmed about him
at this period. While he heard with some inner
ear the suave and eloquent phrases of singular tales,
and watched the lamp-light in amber and purple
wine, his father saw a lean pale boy, with black
eyes that burnt in hollows, and sad and sunken
cheeks.

'You ought to try and eat more, Lucian,' said
the parson; 'and why don't you have some beer?'

He was pecking feebly at the roast mutton and
sipping a little water; but he would not have eaten
or drunk with more relish if the choicest meat and
drink had been before him.

His bones seemed, as Miss Deacon said, to be
growing through his skin ; he had all the appearance
of an ascetic whose body has been reduced to misery
by long and grievous penance. People who chanced
to see him could not help saying to one another:
'How ill and wretched that Lucian Taylor looks!'
They were of course quite unaware of the joy and
luxury in which his real life was spent, and some of
them began to pity him, and to speak to him kindly.

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The Hill of Dreams

It was too late for that. The friendly words had
as much lost their meaning as the words of contempt.
Edward Dixon hailed him cheerfully in the street
one day:

'Come into my den, won't you, old fellow?' he
said. 'You won't see the pater. I've managed to
bag a bottle of his old port. I know you smoke
like a furnace, and I've got some ripping cigars.
You will come, won't you ! I can tell you the pater's
booze is first rate.'

He gently declined and went on. Kindness and
unkindness, pity and contempt had become for him
mere phrases; he could not have distinguished one
from the other. Hebrew and Chinese, Hungarian
and Pushtu would be pretty much alike to an agri-
cultural labourer; if he cared to listen he might de-
tect some general differences in sound, but all four
tongues would be equally devoid of significance.

To Lucian, entranced in the garden of Aval-
launius, it seemed very strange that he had once
been so ignorant of all the exquisite meanings of
life. Now, beneath the violet sky, looking through
the brilliant trellis of the vines, he saw the picture;
before, he had gazed in sad astonishment at the
squalid rag which was wrapped about it.

146

v

AND he was at last in the city of the un-
ending murmuring streets, a part of the
stirring shadow, of the amber-lighted
gloom.

It seemed a long time since he had knelt before
his sweetheart in the lane, the moon-fire streaming
upon them from the dark circle of the fort, the air
and the light and his soul full of haunting, the touch
of the unimaginable thrilling his heart; and now he
sat in a terrible 'bed-sitting-room' in a western sub-
urb, confronted by a heap and litter of papers on
the desk of a battered old bureau.

He had put his breakfast-tray out on the land-
ing, and was thinking of the morning's work, and
of some very dubious pages that he had blackened
the night before. But when he had lit his disreput-
able briar, he remembered there was an unopened
letter waiting for him on the table; he had re-
cognised the vague, staggering script of Miss
Deacon, his cousin. There was not much news; his
father was 'just the same as usual,' there had been a
good deal of rain, the farmers expected to make a
lot of cider, and so forth. But at the close of the

The Hill of Dreams

letter Miss Deacon became useful for reproof and
admonition.

'I was at Caermaen on Tuesday,' she said, 'and
called on the Gervases and the Dixons. Mr. Ger-
vase smiled when I told him you were a literary
man, living in London, and said he was afraid you
wouldn't find it a very practical career. Mrs. Ger-
vase was very proud of Henry's success; he passed
fifth for some examination, and will begin with
nearly four hundred a year. I don't wonder the
Gervases are delighted. Then I went to the
Dixon's, and had tea. Mrs. Dixon wanted to know
if you had published anything yet, and I said I
thought not. She showed me a book everybody is
talking about, called the Dog and the Doctor.
She says it's selling by thousands, and that one
can't take up a paper without seeing the author's
name. She told me to tell you that you ought to
try to write something like it. Then Mr. Dixon
came in from the study, and your name was men-
tioned again. He said he was afraid you had made
rather a mistake in trying to take up literature as
if it were a profession, and seemed to think that a
place in a house of business would be more suitable
and more practical. He pointed out that you had
not had the advantages of a university training, and
said that you would find men who had made good
friends, and had the tone of the university, would
be before you at every step. He said Edward was

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doing very well at Oxford. He writes to them that
he knows several noblemen, and that young Philip
Bullingham (son of Sir John Bullingham) is his
most intimate friend; of course this is very satis-
factory for the Dixons. I am afraid, my dear
Lucian, you have rather overrated your powers.
Wouldn't it be better, even now, to look out for
some real work to do, instead of wasting your time
over those silly old books. I know quite well how
the Gervases and the Dixons feel; they think idle-
ness so injurious for a young man, and likely to
lead to bad habits. You know, my dear Lucian, I
am only writing like this because of my affection for
you, so I am sure, my dear boy, you won't be of-
fended.'

Lucian pigeon-holed the letter solemnly in the
receptacle lettered 'Barbarians.' He felt that he
ought to ask himself some serious questions: 'Why
haven't I passed fifth? why isn't Philip (son of
Sir John) my most intimate friend? why am I an
idler, liable to fall into bad habits?' but he was
eager to get to his work, a curious and intricate
piece of analysis. So the battered bureau, the
litter of papers, and the thick fume of his pipe, en-
gulfed him and absorbed him for the rest of the
morning. Outside were the dim October mists, the
dreary and languid life of a side street, and beyond,
on the main road, the hum and jangle of the gliding
trams. But he heard none of the uneasy noises of

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the quarter, not even the shriek of the garden gates
nor the yelp of the butcher on his rounds, for de-
light in his great task made him unconscious of the
world outside.

He had come by curious paths to this calm hermi-
tage between Shepherd's Bush and Acton Vale.
The golden weeks of the summer passed on in their
enchanted procession, and Annie had not returned,
neither had she written. Lucian, on his side, sat
apart, wondering why his longing for her were not
sharper. As he thought of his raptures he would
smile faintly to himself, and wonder whether he
had not lost the world and Annie with it. In the
garden of Avallaunius his sense of external things
had grown dim and indistinct; the actual, material
life seemed every day to become a show, a fleeting
of shadows across a great white light. At last the
news came that Annie Morgan had been married
from her sister's house to a young farmer, to whom,
it appeared, she had been long engaged, and Lucian
was ashamed to find himself only conscious of
amusement, mingled with gratitude. She had been
the key that opened the shut palace, and he was now
secure on the throne of ivory and gold. A few
days after he had heard the news he repeated the
adventure of his boyhood; for the second time he
scaled the steep hillside, and penetrated the matted
brake. He expected violent disillusion, but his feel-
ing was rather astonishment at the activity of boy-

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ish imagination. There was no terror nor amaze-
ment now in the green bulwarks, and the stunted
undergrowth did not seem in any way extraordi-
nary. Yet he did not laugh at the memory of his
sensations, he was not angry at the cheat. Cer-
tainly it had all been illusion, all the heats and chills
of boyhood, its thoughts of terror were without
significance. But he recognised that the illusions
of the child only differed from those of the man in
that they were more picturesque; belief in fairies
and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of
happiness were equally vain, but the latter form of
faith was ugly as well as inept. It was better, he
knew, and wiser, to wish for a fairy coach than to
cherish longings for a well-appointed brougham and
liveried servants.

He turned his back on the green walls and the
dark oaks without any feeling of regret or resent-
ment. After a while he began to think of his ad-
ventures with pleasure; the ladder by which he had
mounted had disappeared, but he was safe on the
height. By the chance fancy of a beautiful girl he
had been redeemed from a world of misery and tor-
ture, the world of external things into which he had
come a stranger, by which he had been tormented.
He looked back at a kind of vision of himself seen
as he was a year before, a pitiable creature burning
and twisting on the hot coals of the pit, crying
lamentably to the laughing bystanders for but one

The Hill of Dreams

drop of cold water wherewith to cool his tongue.
He confessed to himself, with some contempt, that
he had been a social being, depending for his happi-
ness on the goodwill of others; he had tried hard
to write, chiefly, it was true, from love of the art,
but a little from a social motive. He had imagined
that a written book and the praise of responsible
journals would ensure him the respect of the county
people. It was a quaint idea, and he saw the
lamentable fallacies naked; in the first place, a
painstaking artist in words was not respected by
the respectable; secondly, books should not be
written with the object of gaining the goodwill of
the landed and commercial interests; thirdly and
chiefly, no man should in any way depend on an-
other.

From this utter darkness, from danger of mad-
ness, the ever dear and sweet Annie had rescued
him. Very beautifully and fitly, as Lucian thought,
she had done her work without any desire to benefit
him, she had simply willed to gratify her own pas-
sion, and in doing this had handed to him the price-
less secret. And he, on his side, had reversed the
process; merely to make himself a splendid offer-
ing for the acceptance of his sweetheart, he had cast
aside the vain world, and had found the truth,
which now remained with him, precious and endur-
ing.

And since the news of the marriage he found
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The Hill of Dreams

that his worship of her had by no means vanished;
rather in his heart was the eternal treasure of a
happy love, untarnished and spotless; it would be
like a mirror of gold without alloy, bright and
lustrous forever. For Lucian, it was no defect in
the woman that she was desirous and faithless; he
had not conceived an affection for certain moral or
intellectual accidents, but for the very woman.
Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is
to be judged by literature, and not literature by
humanity, he detected the analogy between Lycidas
and Annie. Only the dullard would object to the
nauseous cant of the one, or to the indiscretions of
the other. A sober critic might say that the man
who could generalise Herbert and Laud, Donne
and Herrick, Sanderson and Juxon, Hammond and
Lancelot Andrewes into 'our corrupted clergy' must
be either an imbecile or a scoundrel, or probably
both. The judgment would be perfectly true, but
as a criticism of Lycidas it would be a piece of
folly. In the case of the woman one could imagine
the attitude of the conventional lover; of the cheva-
lier who, with his tongue in his cheek, 'reverences
and respects' all women, and coming home early in
the morning writes a leading article on St. English
Girl. Lucian, on the other hand, felt profoundly
grateful to the delicious Annie, because she had at
precisely the right moment voluntarily removed her
image from his way. He confessed to himself

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The Hill of Dreams

that, latterly, he had a little dreaded her return as
an interruption; he had shivered at the thought
that their relations would become what was so ter-
ribly called an 'intrigue' or 'affair.' There would be
all the threadbare and common stratagems, the vul-
garity of secret assignations, and an atmosphere
suggesting the period of Mr. Thomas Moore and
Lord Byron and 'segars.' Lucian had been afraid
of all this ; he had feared lest love itself should de-
stroy love.

He considered that now, freed from the torment
of the body, leaving untasted the green water that
makes thirst more burning, he was perfectly in-
itiated in the true knowledge of the splendid and
glorious love. There seemed to him a monstrous
paradox in the assertion that there could be no true
love without a corporal presence of the beloved;
even the popular sayings of 'absence makes the
heart grow fonder,' and 'familiarity breeds con-
tempt,' witnessed to the contrary. He thought,
sighing, and with compassion, of the manner in
which men are continually led astray by the cheat
of the senses. In order that the unborn might
still be added to the born, nature had inspired men
with the wild delusion that the bodily companionship
of the lover and the beloved was desirable above all
things, and so, by the false show of pleasure, the
human race was chained to vanity, and doomed to
an eternal thirst for the non-existent.

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The Hill of Dreams

Again and again he gave thanks for his own es-
cape; he had been set free from a life of vice and
sin and folly, from all the dangers and illusions that
are most dreaded by the wise. He laughed as he
remembered what would be the common view of
the situation. An ordinary lover would suffer all
the sting of sorrow and contempt; there would be
grief for a lost mistress, and rage at her faithless-
ness, and hate in the heart; one foolish passion driv-
ing on another, and driving the man to ruin. For
what would be commonly called the real woman he
now cared nothing; if he had heard that she had
died in her farm in Utter Gwent, he would have
experienced only a passing sorrow, such as he might
feel at the death of any one he had once known.
But he did not think of the young farmer's wife as
the real Annie; he did not think of the frost-bitten
leaves in winter as the real rose. Indeed, the life
of many reminded him of the flowers; perhaps more
especially of those flowers which to all appearance
are for many years but dull and dusty clumps of
green, and suddenly, in one night, burst into the
flame of blossom, and fill all the misty lawns with
odour: till the morning. It was in that night that
the flower lived, not through the long unprofitable
years; and, in like manner, many human lives, he
thought, were born in the evening and dead before
the coming of day. But he had preserved the
precious flower in all its glory, not suffering it to

'55

The Hill of Dreams

wither in the hard light, but keeping it in a secret
place, where it could never be destroyed. Truly
now, and for the first time, he possessed Annie, as
a man possesses gold which he has dug from the
rock and purged of its baseness.

He was musing over these things when a piece
of news, very strange and unexpected, arrived at
the rectory. A distant, almost a mythical relative,
known from childhood as 'Cousin Edward in the
Isle of Wight,' had died, and by some strange freak
had left Lucian two thousand pounds. It was a
pleasure to give his father five hundred pounds, and
the rector on his side forgot for a couple of days
to lean his head on his hand. From the rest of the
capital, which was well invested, Lucian found
he would derive something between sixty and
seventy pounds a year, and his old desires for
literature and a refuge in the murmuring streets re-
turned to him. He longed to be free from the in-
cantations that surrounded him in the country, to
work and live in a new atmosphere; and so, with
many good wishes from his father, he came to the
retreat in the waste places of London.

He was in high spirits when he found the square,
clean room, horribly furnished, in the by-street that
branched from the main road, and advanced in an
unlovely sweep to the mud pits and the desolation
that was neither town nor country. On every side
monotonous grey streets, each house the replica of

The Hill of Dreams

its neighbour, to the east an unexplored wilderness,
north and west and south the brickfields and market-
gardens, everywhere the ruins of the country, the
tracks where sweet lanes had been, gangrened
stumps of trees, the relics of hedges, here and there
an oak stripped of its bark, white and haggard and
leprous like a corpse. And the air seemed always
grey, and the smoke from the brickfields was grey.

At first he scarcely realised the quarter into which
chance had led him. His only thought was of the
great adventure of letters in which he proposed to
engage, and his first glance round his 'bed-sitting-
room' showed him that there was no piece of furni-
ture suitable for his purpose. The table, like the
rest of the suite, was of bird's-eye maple; but the
maker seemed to have penetrated the druidic secret
of the rocking-stone, the thing was in a state of un-
stable equilibrium perpetually. For some days he
wandered through the streets, inspecting the second-
hand furniture shops, and at last, in a forlorn by-
way, found an old Japanese bureau, dishonoured
and forlorn, standing amongst rusty bedsteads,
sorry china, and all the refuse of homes dead and
desolate. The bureau pleased him in spite of its
grime and grease and dirt. Inlaid mother-of-pearl,
the gleam of lacquer dragons in red gold, and hints
of curious design shone through the film of neglect
and ill-usage, and when the woman of the shop
showed him the drawers and well and pigeon-holes,

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he saw that it would be an instrument for his
studies.

The bureau was carried to his room and replaced
the 'bird's-eye' table under the gas-jet. As Lucian
arranged what papers he had accumulated: the
sketches of hopeless experiments, shreds and tatters
of stories begun but never completed, outlines of
plots, two or three note-books scribbled through
and through with impressions of the abandoned
hills, he felt a thrill of exaltation at the prospect of
work to be accomplished, of a new world all open
before him.

He set out on the adventure with a fury of en-
thusiasm; his last thought at night when all the
maze of streets was empty and silent was of the
problem, and his dreams ran on phrases, and when
he awoke in the morning he was eager to get back
to his desk. He immersed himself in a minute, al-
most ia microscopic analysis of fine literature. It was
no longer enough, as in the old days, to feel the
charm and incantation of a line or a word; he
wished to penetrate the secret, to understand some-
thing of the wonderful suggestion, all apart from
the sense, that seemed to him the differentia of
literature, as distinguished from the long follies of
'character-drawing,' 'psychological analysis,' and all
the stuff that went to make the three-volume novel
of commerce.

He found himself curiously strengthened by the

The Hill of Dreams

change from the hills to the streets. There could
be no doubt, he thought, that living a lonely life,
interested only in himself and his own thoughts, he
had become in a measure inhuman. The form of
external things, black depths in woods, pools in
lonely places, those still valleys curtained by hills
on every side, sounding always with the ripple of
their brooks, had become to him an influence like
that of a drug, giving a certain peculiar colour and
outline to his thoughts. And from early boyhood
there had been another strange flavour in his life,
the dream of the old Roman world, those curious
impressions that he had gathered from the white
walls of Caermaen, and from the looming bastions
of the fort. It was in reality the subconscious
fancies of many years that had rebuilt the golden
city, and had shown him the vine-trellis and the
marbles and the sunlight in the garden of Aval-
launius. And the rapture of love had made it all
so vivid and warm with life, that even now, when
he let his pen drop, the rich noise of the tavern
and the chant of the theatre sounded above the mur-
mur of the streets. Looking back, it was as much
a part of his life as his schooldays, and the tessel-
lated pavements were as real as the square of faded
carpet beneath his feet.

But he felt that he had escaped. He could now
survey those splendid and lovely visions from with-
out, as if he read of opium dreams, and he no longer

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The Hill of Dreams

dreaded a weird suggestion that had once beset him,
that his very soul was being moulded into the hills,
and passing into the black mirror of still water-
pools. He had taken refuge in the streets, in the
harbour of a modern suburb, from the vague,
dreaded magic that had charmed his life. When-
ever he felt inclined to listen to the old wood-
whisper or to the singing of the fauns he bent more
earnestly over his work, turning a deaf ear to the
incantation.

In the curious labour of the bureau he found re-
freshment that was continually renewed. He ex-
perienced again, and with a far more violent im-
pulse, the enthusiasm that had attended the writ-
ing of his book a year or two before, and so, per-
haps, passed from one drug to another. It was,
indeed, with something of rapture that he imagined
the great procession of years all to be devoted to
the intimate analysis of words, to the construction
of the sentence, as if it were a piece of jewellery or
mosaic.

Sometimes, in the pauses of the work, he would
pace up and down his cell, looking out of the win-
dow now and again and gazing for an instant into
the melancholy street. As the year advanced the
days grew more and more misty, and he found him-
self the inhabitant of a little island wreathed about
with the waves of a white and solemn sea. In the
afternoon the fog would grow denser, shutting out

1 60

The Hill of Dreams

not only sight but sound; the shriek of the garden
gates, the jangling of the tram-bell echoed as if
from far away. Then there were days of heavy
incessant rain; he could see a grey drifting sky and
the drops splashing in the street, and the houses all
dripping and saddened with wet.

He cured himself of one great aversion. He was
no longer nauseated at the sight of a story begun and
left unfinished. Formerly, even when an idea rose
in his mind bright and wonderful, he had always ap-
proached the paper with a feeling of sickness and
dislike, remembering all the hopeless beginnings he
had made. But now he understood that to begin a
romance was almost a separate and special art, a
thing apart from the story, to be practised with sed-
ulous care. Whenever an opening scene occurred to
him he noted it roughly in a book, and he devoted
many long winter evenings to the elaboration of these
beginnings. Sometimes the first impression would
yield only a paragraph or a sentence, and once or
twice but a splendid and sonorous word, which
seemed to Lucian all dim and rich with unsurmised
adventure. But often he was able to write three
or four vivid pages, studying above all things the
hint and significance of the words and actions,
striving to work into the lines the atmosphere of
expectation and promise, and the murmur of won-
derful events to come.

In this one department of his task the labour
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The Hill of Dreams

seemed almost endless. He would finish a few
pages and then rewrite them, using the same inci-
dent and nearly the same words, but altering that
indefinite something which is scarcely so much style
as manner, or atmosphere. He was astonished at
the enormous change that was thus effected, and
often, though he himself had done the work, he
could scarcely describe in words how it was done.
But it was clear that in this art of manner, or sug-
gestion, lay all the chief secrets of literature, that
by it all the great miracles were performed. Clearly
it was not style, for style in itself was untranslat-
able, but it was that high theurgic magic that made
the English Don Quixote, roughly traduced by some
Jervas, perhaps the best of all English books. And
it was the same element that made the journey of
Roderick Random to London, ostensibly a narrative
of coarse jokes and common experiences and bur-
lesque manners, told in no very choice diction, essen-
tially a wonderful vision of the eighteenth century,
carrying to one's very nostrils the aroma of the
Great North Road iron-bound under black frost,
darkened beneath shuddering woods, haunted by
highwaymen, with an adventure waiting beyond
every turn, and great old echoing inns in the midst
of lonely winter lands.

It was this magic that Lucian sought for his open-
ing chapters ; he tried to find that quality that gives
to words something beyond their sound and beyond

162

The Hill of Dreams

their meaning, that in the first lines of a book should
whisper things unintelligible but all significant.
Often he worked for many hours without success,
and the grim wet dawn once found him still search-
ing for hieroglyphic sentences, for words mystical,
symbolic. On the shelves, in the upper part of his
bureau, he had placed the books which, however
various as to matter, seemed to have a part in this
curious quality of suggestion, and in that sphere
which might almost be called supernatural. To
these books he often had recourse, when further
effort appeared altogether hopeless, and certain
pages in Coleridge and Edgar Allan Poe had the
power of holding him in a trance of delight, subject
to emotions and impressions which he knew to trans-
cend altogether the realm of the formal understand-
ing. Such lines as:

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the dews that drip all over ;

had for Lucian more than the potency of a drug,
lulling him into a splendid waking-sleep, every word
being a supreme incantation. And it was not only
his mind that was charmed by such passages, for
he felt at the same time a strange and delicious
bodily languor that held him motionless, without
the desire or power to stir from his seat. And

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The Hill of Dreams

there were certain phrases in Kubla Khan that had
such a magic that he would sometimes wake up, as
it were, to the consciousness that he had been lying
on the bed or sitting in the chair by the bureau, re-
peating a single line over and over again for two or
three hours. Yet he knew perfectly well that he
had not been really asleep ; a little effort recalled a
constant impression of the wall-paper, with its pink
flowers on a buff ground, and the muslin-curtained
window, letting in the grey winter light. He had
been some seven months in London when this odd
experience first occurred to him. The day opened
dreary and cold and clear, with a gusty and restless
wind whirling round the corner of the street, and
lifting the dead leaves and scraps of paper that lit-
tered the roadway into eddying mounting circles,
as if a storm of black rain were to come. Lucian
had sat late the night before, and rose in the morn-
ing feeling weary and listless and heavy-headed.
While he dressed, his legs dragged him as with
weights, and he staggered and nearly fell in bend-
ing down to the mat outside for his tea-tray. He
lit the spirit lamp on the hearth with shaking, un-
steady hands, and could scarcely pour out the tea
when it was ready. A delicate cup of tea was one
of his few luxuries; he was fond of the strange
flavour of the green leaf, and this morning he drank
the straw-coloured liquid eagerly, hoping it would
disperse the cloud of langour. He tried his best

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The Hill of Dreams

to coerce himself into the sense of vigour and en-
joyment with which he usually began the day, walk-
ing briskly up and down and arranging his papers
in order. But he could not free himself from de-
pression; even as he opened the dear bureau a wave
of melancholy came upon him, and he began to ask
himself whether he were not pursuing a vain dream,
searching for treasures that had no existence. He
drew out his cousin's letter and read it again, sadly
enough. After all there was a good deal of truth
in what she said; he had 'overrated' his powers, he
had no friends, no real education. He began to
count up the months since he had come to London;
he had received his two thousand pounds in March,
and in May he had said good-bye to the woods and
to the dear and friendly paths. May, June, July,
August, September, October, November, and half
of December had gone by, and what had he to show?
Nothing but the experiment, the attempt, futile
scribblings which had no end nor shining purpose.
There was nothing in his desk that he could produce
as evidence of his capacity, no fragment even of
accomplishment. It was a thought of intense bitter-
ness, but it seemed as if the barbarians were in the
right — a place in a house of business would have
been more suitable. He leaned his head on his
desk overwhelmed with the severity of his own
judgment. He tried to comfort himself again by
the thought of all the hours of happy enthusiasm

The Hill of Dreams

he had spent amongst his papers, working for a
great idea with infinite patience. He recalled to
mind something that he had always tried to keep
in the background of his hopes, the foundation stone
of his life, which he had hidden out of sight. Deep
in his heart was the hope that he might one day
write a valiant book; he scarcely dared to entertain
the aspiration, he felt his incapacity too deeply, but
yet this longing was the foundation of all his painful
and patient effort. This he had proposed in secret
to himself, that if he laboured without ceasing, with-
out tiring, he might produce something which would
at all events be art, which would stand wholly apart
from the objects shaped like books, printed with
printers' ink, and called by the name of books that
he had read. Giotto, he knew, was a painter, and
the man who imitated walnut-wood on the deal doors
opposite was a painter, and he had wished to be a
very humble pupil in the class of the former. It
was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquis-
ite things than to succeed in the department of the
utterly contemptible ; he had vowed he would be the
dunce of Cervantes's school rather than top-boy in
the academy of A Bad Un to Beat and Millicent's
Marriage. And with this purpose he had devoted
himself to laborious and joyous years, so that how-
ever mean his capacity, the pains should not be want-
ing. He tried now to rouse himself from a growing
misery by the recollection of this high aim, but it

166

The Hill of Dreams

all seemed hopeless vanity. He looked out into
the grey street, and it stood a symbol of his life,
chill and dreary and grey and vexed with a horrible
wind. There were the dull inhabitants of the quar-
ter going about their common business; a man was
crying 'mackerel' in a doleful voice, slowly passing
up the street, and staring into the white-curtained
'parlours,' searching for the face of a purchaser
behind the india-rubber plants, stuffed birds, and
piles of gaujly gilt books that adorned the windows.
One of the blistered doors over the way banged,
and a woman came scurrying out on some errand,
and the garden gate shrieked two melancholy notes
as she opened it and let it swing back after her.
The little patches called gardens were mostly un-
tilled, uncared for, squares of slimy moss, dotted
with clumps of coarse ugly grass, but here and there
were the blackened and rotting remains of sun-
flowers and marigolds. And beyond, he knew,
stretched the labyrinth of streets more or less
squalid, but all grey and dull, and behind were the
mud pits and the steaming heaps of yellowish bricks,
and to the north was a great wide cold waste, tree-
less, desolate, swept by bitter wind. It was all like
his own life, he said again to himself, a maze of
unprofitable dreariness and desolation, and his mind
grew as black and hopeless as the winter sky. The
morning went thus dismally till twelve o'clock, and
he put on his hat and great-coat. He always went

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The Hill of Dreams

out for an hour every day between twelve and one;
the exercise was a necessity, and the landlady made
his bed in the interval. The wind blew the smoke
from the chimneys into his face as he shut the door,
and with the acrid smoke came the prevailing odour
of the street, a blend of cabbage-water and burnt
bones and the faint sickly vapour from the brick-
fields. Lucian walked mechanically for the hour,
going eastward, along the main road. The wind
pierced him, and the dust was blinding, and the
dreariness of the street increased his misery. The
row of common shops, full of common things, the
blatant public-houses, the Independent chapel, a
horrible stucco parody of a Greek temple with a
facade of hideous columns that was a nightmare,
villas like smug Pharisees, shops again, a church in
cheap Gothic, an old garden blasted and riven by
the builder, these were the pictures of the way.
When he got home again he flung himself on the
bed, and lay there stupidly till sheer hunger roused
him. He ate a hunch of bread and drank some
water, and began to pace up and down the room,
wondering whether there were no escape from de-
spair. Writing seemed quite impossible, and hardly
knowing what he did he opened his bureau and took
out a book from the shelves. As his eyes fell on
the page the air grew dark and heavy as night, and
the wind wailed suddenly, loudly, terribly.

'By woman wailing for her Demon lover.' The
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The Hill of Dreams

words were on his lips when he raised his eyes again.
A broad band of pale clear light was shining into
the room, and when he looked out of the window he
saw the road all brightened by glittering pools of
water, and as the last drops of the rain-storm
starred these mirrors the sun sank into the wrack.
Lucian gazed about him, perplexed, till his eyes fell
on the clock above his empty hearth. He had been
sitting, motionless, for nearly two hours without any
sense of the passage of time, and without ceasing
he had murmured those words as he dreamed an end-
less wonderful story. He experienced somewhat
the sensations of Coleridge himself; strange, amaz-
ing, ineffable things seemed to have been presented
to him, not in the form of the idea, but actually
and materially, but he was less fortunate than Cole-
ridge in that he could not, even vaguely, image to
himself what he had seen. Yet when he searched
his mind he knew that the consciousness of the room
in which he sat had never left him; he had seen the
thick darkness gather, and had heard the whirl of
rain hissing through the air. Windows had been
shut down with a crash, he had noted the pattering
footsteps of people running to shelter, the landlady's
voice crying to some one to look at the rain coming
in under the door. It was like peering into some
old bituminous picture, one could see at last that
the mere blackness resolved itself into the likeness
of trees and rocks and travellers. And against this

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The Hill of Dreams

background of his room, and the storm, and the
noises of the street, his vision stood out illuminated,
he felt he had descended to the very depths, into
the caverns that are hollowed beneath the soul.
He tried vainly to record the history of his impres-
sions ; the symbols remained in his memory, but the
meaning was all conjecture.

The next morning, when he awoke, he could
scarcely understand or realise the bitter depression
of the preceding day. He found it had all van-
ished away and had been succeeded by an intense ex-
altation. Afterwards, when at rare intervals he
experienced the same strange possession of the con-
sciousness, he found this to be the invariable result,
the hour of vision was always succeeded by a feel-
ing of delight, by sensations of heightened and in-
tensified powers. On that bright December day
after the storm he rose joyously, and set about the
labour of the bureau with the assurance of success,
almost with the hope of the formidable difficulties
to be overcome. He had long busied himself with
those curious researches which Poe has indicated in
the Philosophy of Composition, and many hours
had been spent in analysing the singular effects which
may be produced by the sound and resonance of
words. But he had been struck by the thought that
in the finest literature there were more subtle tones
than the loud and insistent music of 'never more,'
and he endeavoured to find the secret of those pages

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The Hill of Dreams

and sentences which spoke, less directly, and less ob-
viously, to the soul rather than to the ear, being
filled with a certain grave melody and the sensation
of singing voices. It was admirable, no doubt, to
write phrases that showed at a glance their designed
rhythm, and rang with sonorous words, but he
dreamed of a prose in which the music should be
less explicit, of neumes rather than notes. He was
astonished that morning at his own fortune and
facility; he succeeded in covering a page of ruled
paper wholly to his satisfaction, and the sentences,
when he read them out, appeared to suggest a weird
elusive chanting, exquisite but almost imperceptible,
like the echo of the plainsong reverberated from
the vault of a monastic church.

He thought that such happy mornings well re-
paid him for the anguish of depression which he
sometimes had to suffer, and for the strange experi-
ence of 'possession' recurring at rare intervals, and
usually after many weeks of severe diet. His in-
come, he found, amounted to about sixty-five pounds
a year, and he lived for weeks at a time on fifteen
shillings a week. During these austere periods his
only food was bread, at the rate of a loaf a day;
but he drank huge draughts of green tea, and
smoked a black tobacco, which seemed to him a
more potent mother of thought than any drug from
the scented East. 'I hope you go to some nice place
for dinner,' wrote his cousin ; 'there used to be some

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The Hill of Dreams

excellent eating-houses in London where one could
get a good cut from the joint, with plenty of gravy,
and a boiled potato, for a shilling. Aunt Mary
writes that you should try Mr. Jones's in Water
Street, Islington, whose father came from near
Caermaen, and was always most comfortable in her
day. I daresay the walk there would do you good.
It is such a pity you smoke that horrid tobacco. I
had a letter from Mrs. Dolly (Jane Diggs, who
married your cousin John Dolly) the other day, and
she said they would have been delighted to take you
for only twenty-five shillings a week for the sake of
the family if you had not been a smoker. She
told me to ask you if you had ever seen a horse or
a dog smoking tobacco. They are such nice, com-
fortable people, and the children would have been
company for you. Johnnie, who used to be such
a dear little fellow, has just gone into an office in
the City, and seems to have excellent prospects.
How I wish, my dear Lucian, that you could do
something in the same way. Don't forget Mr.
Jones's in Water Street, and you might mention
your name to him.'

Lucian never troubled Mr. Jones; but these
letters of his cousin's always refreshed him by the
force of contrast. He tried to imagine himself a
part of the Dolly family, going dutifully every
morning to the City on the 'bus, and returning in
the evening for high tea. He could conceive the

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The Hill of Dreams

fine odour of hot roast beef hanging about the deco-
rous house on Sunday afternoons, papa asleep in
the dining-room, mamma lying down, and the chil-
dren quite good and happy with their 'Sunday
books.' In the evening, after supper, one read the
Quiver till bedtime. Such pictures as these were to
Lucian a comfort and a help, a remedy against de-
spair. Often when he felt overwhelmed by the dif-
ficulty of the work he had undertaken, he thought
of the alternative career, and was strengthened.

He returned again and again to that desire of a
prose which should sound faintly, not so much with
an audible music, but with the memory and echo of
it. In the night, when the last tram had gone jan-
gling by, and he had looked out and seen the street
all wrapped about in heavy folds of the mist, he
conducted some of his most delicate experiments.
In that white and solitary midnight of the suburban
street he experienced the curious sense of being on
a tower, remote and apart and high above all the
troubles of the earth. The gas lamp, which was
nearly opposite, shone in a pale halo of light, and
the houses themselves were merely indistinct marks
and shadows amidst that palpable whiteness, shut-
ting out the world and its noises. The knowledge of
the swarming life that was so still, though it sur-
rounded him, made the silence seem deeper than that
of the mountains before the dawn; it was as if he
alone stirred and looked out amidst a host sleeping

'73

The Hill of Dreams

at his feet. The fog came in by the open window
in freezing puffs, and as Lucian watched he noticed
that it shook and wavered like the sea, tossing up
wreaths and drifts across the pale halo of the lamp,
and these vanishing, others succeeded. It was as if
the mist passed by from the river to the north, as if
it still passed by in the silence.

He would shut his window gently, and sit down
in his lighted room with all the consciousness of the
white advancing shroud upon him. It was then
that he found himself in the mood for curious
labours, and able to handle with some touch of con-
fidence the more exquisite instruments of the craft.
He sought for that magic by which all the glory
and glamour of mystic chivalry were made to shine
through the burlesque and gross adventures of Don
Quixote, by which Hawthorne had lit his infernal
Sabbath fires, and fashioned a burning aureole
about the village tragedy of the Scarlet Letter. In
Hawthorne the story and the suggestion, though
quite distinct and of different worlds, were rather
parallel than opposed to one another; but Cervantes
had done a stranger thing. One read of Don
Quixote, beaten, dirty, and ridiculous, mistaking
windmills for giants, sheep for an army; but the
impression was of the enchanted forest, of Avalon,
of the San Graal, 'far in the spiritual city.' And
Rabelais showed him, beneath the letter, the Tour-
ainian sun shining on the hot rock above Chinon, on

174

The Hill of Dreams

the maze of narrow, climbing streets, on the high-
pitched, gabled roofs, on the grey-blue tourelles,
pricking upward from the fantastic labyrinth of
walls. He heard the sound of sonorous plainsong
from the monastic choir, of gross exuberant gaiety
from the rich vineyards; he listened to the eternal
mystic mirth of them that halted in the pv.rple
shadow of the sorbier by the white, steep road.
The gracious and ornate chateaux on the Loire and
the Vienne rose fair and shining to confront the in-
credible secrets of vast, dim, far-lifted Gothic naves,
that seemed ready to take the great deep, and float
away from the mist and dust of earthly streets to
anchor in the haven of the clear city that hath foun-
dations. The rank tale of the garde-robe, of the
farm-kitchen, mingled with the reasoned, endless
legend of the schools, with luminous Platonic argu-
ment; the old pomp of the Middle Ages put on the
robe of a fresh life. There was a smell of wine and
of incense, of June meadows and of ancient books,
and through it all he hearkened, intent, to the ex-
ultation of chiming bells ringing for a new feast in
a new land. He would cover pages with the analy-
sis of these marvels, tracking the suggestion con-
cealed beneath the words, and yet glowing like the
golden threads in a robe of samite, or like that de-
vice of the old binders by which a vivid picture ap-
peared on the shut edges of a book. He tried to
imitate this art, to summon even a faint shadow of

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The Hill of Dreams

the great effect, rewriting a page of Hawthorne,
experimenting and changing an epithet here and
there, noting how sometimes the alteration of a
trifling word would plunge a whole scene into dark-
ness, as if one of those blood-red fires had instantly
been extinguished. Sometimes, for severe practice,
he attempted to construct short tales in the manner
of this or that master. He sighed over these des-
perate attempts, over the clattering pieces of mech-
anism which would not even simulate life; but he
urged himself to an infinite perseverance. Through
the white hours he worked on amidst the heap and
litter of papers; books and manuscripts overflowed
from the bureau to the floor; and if he looked out
he saw the mist still pass by, still passing from the
river to the north.

It was not till the winter was well advanced that
he began at all to explore the region in which he
lived. Soon after his arrival in the grey street he
had taken one or two vague walks, hardly noticing
where he went or what he saw; but for all the sum-
mer he had shut himself in his room, beholding
nothing but the form and colour of words. For his
morning walk he almost invariably chose the one
direction, going along the Uxbridge Road towards
Notting Hill, and returning by the same monoton-
ous thoroughfare. Now, however, when the new
year was beginning its dull days, he began to di-
verge occasionally to right and left, sometimes eat-

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The Hill of Dreams

ing his luncheon in odd corners, in the bulging par-
lours of eighteenth-century taverns, that still
fronted the surging sea of modern streets, or per-
haps in brand new 'publics' on the broken borders
of the brickfields, smelling of the clay from which
they had swollen. He found waste by-places be-
hind railway embankments where he could smoke
his pipe sheltered from the wind; sometimes there
was a wooden fence by an old pear-orchard where he
sat and gazed at the wet desolation of the market-
gardens, munching a few currant biscuits by way of
dinner. As he went farther afield x sense of immen-
sity slowly grew upon him; it was as if, from the
little island of his room, that one friendly place, he
pushed out into the grey unknown, into a city that
for him was uninhabited as the desert.

He came back to his cell after these purposeless
wanderings always with a sense of relief, with the
thought of taking refuge from grey. As he lit the
gas and opened the desk of his bureau and saw the
pile of papers awaiting him, it was as if he had
passed from the black skies and the stinging wind
and the dull maze of the suburb into all the warmth
and sunlight and violent colour of the south.

177

VI

IT was in this winter after his coming to the grey
street that Lucian first experienced the pains of
desolation. He had all his life known the de-
lights of solitude, and had acquired that habit of
mind which makes a man find rich company on the
bare hillside and leads him into the heart of the
wood to meditate by the dark waterpools. But
now in the blank interval when he was forced to
shut up his desk, the sense of loneliness over-
whelmed him and filled him with unutterable melan-
choly. On such days he carried about with him an
unceasing gnawing torment in his breast; the anguish
of the empty page awaiting him in his bureau, and
the knowledge that it was worse than useless to at-
tempt the work. He had fallen into the habit of
always using this phrase 'the work' to denote the
adventure of literature; it had grown in his mind
to all the austere and grave significance of 'the
great work' on the lips of the alchemists ; it included
every trifling and laborious page and the vague
magnificent fancies that sometimes hovered before
him. All else had become mere byfplay, unim-
portant, trivial; the work was the end, and the
means and the food of his life — it raised him up in

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The Hill of Dreams

the morning to renew the struggle, it was the symbol
which charmed him as he lay down at night. All
through the hours of toil at the bureau he was en-
chanted, and when he went out and explored the
unknown coasts, the one thought allured him, and
was the coloured glass between his eyes and the
world. Then as he drew nearer home his steps
would quicken, and the more weary and grey the
walk, the more he rejoiced as he thought of his
hermitage and of the curious difficulties that awaited
him there. But when, suddenly and without warn-
ing, the faculty disappeared, when his mind seemed a
hopeless waste, from which nothing could arise, then
he became subject to a misery so piteous that the bar-
barians themselves would have been sorry for him.
He had known some foretaste of these bitter and
inexpressible griefs in the old country days, but
then he had immediately taken refuge in the hills,
he had rushed to the dark woods as to an anodyne,
letting his heart drink in all the wonder and magic
of the wild land. Now in these days of January, in
the suburban street, there was no such refuge.

He had been working steadily for some weeks,
well enough satisfied on the whole with the daily
progress, glad to awake in the morning, and to
read over what he had written on the night before.
The new year opened with faint and heavy weather
and a breathless silence in the air, but in a few days
the great frost set in. Soon the streets began to

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suggest the appearance of a beleaguered city, the
silence that had preceded the frost deepened, and
the mist hung over the earth like a dense white
smoke. Night after night the cold increased, and
people seemed unwilling to go abroad, till even the
main thoroughfares were empty and deserted, as if
the inhabitants were lying close in hiding. It was at
this dismal time that Lucian found himself reduced
to impotence. There was a sudden break in his
thought, and when he wrote on valiantly, hoping
against hope, he only grew more aghast on the
discovery of the imbecilities he had committed to
paper. He ground his teeth together and perse-
vered, sick at heart, feeling as if all the world were
fallen from under his feet, driving his pen on me-
chanically, till he was overwhelmed. He saw the
stuff he had done without veil or possible conceal-
ment, a lamentable and wretched sheaf of verbiage,
worse it seemed, than the efforts of his boyhood.
He was no longer tautological, he avoided tautology
with the internal art of a leader-writer, filling his
wind bags and mincing his words as if he had been
a trained journalist on the staff of the Daily Post.
There seemed all the matter of an insufferable
tragedy in these thoughts; that his patient and en-
during toil was in vain, that practice went for
nothing, and that he had wasted the labour of Mil-
ton to accomplish the tenth-rate. Unhappily he
could not 'give in'; the longing, the fury for the

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The Hill of Dreams

work burnt within him like a burning fire; he lifted
up his eyes in despair.

It was then, while he knew that no one could help
him, that he languished for help, and then, though
he was aware that no comfort was possible, he fer-
vently wished to be comforted. The only friend
he had was his father, and he knew that his father
would not even understand his distress. For him,
always, the printed book was the beginning and
end of literature; the agony of the maker, his de-
spair and sickness, were as accursed as the pains of
labour. He was ready to read and admire the work
of the great Smith, but he did not wish to hear of
the period when the great Smith had writhed and
twisted like a scotched worm, only hoping to be put
out of his misery, to go mad or die, to escape some-
how from the bitter pains. And Lucian knew no
one else. Now and then he read in the paper the
fame of the great literateurs; the Gypsies were
entertaining the Prince of Wales, the Jolly Beg-
gars were dining with the Lord Mayor, the Old
Mumpers were mingling amicably and gorgeously
with the leading members of the Stock Exchange.
He was so unfortunate as to know none of these
gentlemen, but it hardly seemed likely that they
could have done much for him in any case. Indeed,
in his heart, he was certain that help and comfort
from without were in the nature of things utterly
impossible, his ruin and grief were within, and only

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The Hill of Dreams

his own assistance could avail. He tried to reassure
himself, to believe that his torments were a proof
of his vocation, that the facility of the novelist who
stood six years deep in contracts to produce ro-
mances was a thing wholly undesirable, but all the
while he longed for but a drop of that inexhaustible
fluency which he professed to despise.

He drove himself out from that dreary con-
templation of the white paper and the idle pen.
He went into the frozen and deserted streets, hoping
that he might pluck the burning coal from his heart,
but the fire was not quenched. As he walked fu-
riously along the grim iron roads he fancied that
those persons who passed him cheerfully on their
way to friends and friendly hearths shrank from
him into the mist as they went by. Lucian im-
agined that the fire of his torment and anguish
must in some way glow visibly about him ; he moved,
perhaps, in a nimbus that proclaimed the blackness
and the flames within. He knew, of course, that in
misery he had grown delirious, that the well-coated,
smooth-hatted personages who loomed out of the
fog upon him were in reality shuddering only with
cold, but in spite of common sense he still conceived
that he saw on their faces an evident horror and
disgust, and something of the repugnance that one
feels at the sight of a venemous snake, half-killed,
trailing its bleeding vileness out of sight. By design
Lucian tried to make for remote and desolate places,

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The Hill of Dreams

and yet when he had succeeded in touching on the
open country, and knew that the icy shadow hovering
through the mist was a field, he longed for some
sound and murmur of life, and turned again to roads
where pale lamps were glimmering, and the dancing
flame of firelight shone across the frozen shrubs.
And the sight of these homely fires, the thought of
affection and consolation waiting by them, stung
him the more sharply perhaps because of the contrast
with his own chills and weariness and helpless sick-
ness, and chiefly because he knew that he had long
closed an everlasting door between his heart and
such felicities. If those within had come out and
had called him by his name to enter and be com-
forted, it would have been quite unavailing, since be-
tween them and him there was a great gulf fixed.
Perhaps for the first time he realised that he had
lost the art of humanity forever. He had thought
when he closed his ears to the wood whisper and
changed the fauns' singing for the murmur of the
streets, the black pools for the shadows and amber
light of London, that he had put off the old life,
and had turned his soul to healthy activities, "but
the truth was that he had merely exchanged one drug
for another. He could not be human, and he won-
dered whether there were some drop of the fairy
blood in his body that made him foreign and a
stranger in the world.

He did not surrender to desolation without re-

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The Hill of Dreams

peated struggles. He strove to allure himself to
his desk by the promise of some easy task; he
would not attempt invention, but he had memoranda
and rough jottings of ideas in his note-book, and
he would merely amplify the suggestions ready to
his hand. But it was hopeless, again and again it
was hopeless. As he read over his notes, trusting
that he would find some hint that might light up the
dead fires, and kindle again that pure flame of en-
thusiasm, he found how desperately his fortune had
fallen. He could see no light, no colour in the
lines he had scribbled with eager trembling fingers ;
he remembered how splendid all these things had
been when he wrote them down, but now they were
meaningless, faded into grey. The few words he
had dashed onto the paper, enraptured at the
thought of the happy hours they promised, had be-
come mere jargon, and when he understood the
idea it seemed foolish, dull, unoriginal. He dis-
covered something at last that appeared to have a
grain of promise, and determined to do his best to
put it into shape, but the first paragraph appalled
him; it might have been written by an unintelligent
schoolboy. He tore the paper in pieces, and shut
and locked his desk, heavy despair sinking like lead
into his heart. For the rest of that day he lay
motionless on the bed, smoking pipe after pipe in
the hope of stupefying himself with tobacco fumes.
The air in the room became blue and thick with

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The Hill of Dreams

smoke ; it was bitterly cold, and he wrapped himself
up in his great-coat and drew the counterpane over
him. The night came on and the window darkened,
and at last he fell asleep.

He renewed the effort at intervals, only to plunge
deeper into misery. He felt the approaches of
madness, and knew that his only hope was to walk
till he was physically exhausted, so that he might
come home almost fainting with fatigue, but ready
to fall asleep the moment he got into bed. He
passed the mornings in a kind of torpor, endeavour-
ing to avoid thought, to occupy his mind with a pat-
tern of the paper, with the advertisements at the
end of a book, with the curious greyness of the light
that glimmered through the mist into his room, with
the muffled voices that rumbled now and then from
the street. He tried to make out the design that
had once coloured the faded carpet on the floor, and
wondered about the dead artist in Japan, the adorner
of his bureau. He speculated as to what his
thoughts had been as he inserted the rainbow
mother-of-pearl and made that great flight of shin-
ing birds, dipping their wings as they rose from the
reeds or how he had conceived the lacquer dragons
in red gold, and the fantastic houses in the garden
of peach-trees. But sooner or later the oppression
of his grief returned, the loud shriek and clang of
the garden-gate, the warning bell of some passing bi-
cyclist steering through the fog, the noise of his pipe

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The Hill of Dreams

falling to the floor, would suddenly awaken him to
the sense of misery. He knew that it was time to go
out; he could not bear to sit still and suffer. Some-
times he cut a slice of bread and put it in his pocket,
sometimes he trusted to the chance of finding a
public-house where he could have a sandwich and a
glass of beer. He turned always from the main
streets and lost himself in the intricate surburban
byways, willing to be engulfed in the infinite white-
ness of the mist.

The roads had stiffened into iron ridges, the
fences and trees were glittering with frost crystals,
everything was of strange and altered aspect.
Lucian walked on and on through the maze, now in
a circle of shadowy villas, awful as the buried streets
of Herculaneum, now in lanes dipping into the open
country, that led him past great elm-trees whose
white boughs were all still, and past the bitter lonely
fields where the mist seemed to fade away into grey
darkness. As he wandered along these unfamiliar
and ghastly paths he became the more convinced of
his utter remoteness from all humanity, he allowed
that grotesque suggestion of there being something
visibly amiss in his outward appearance to grow
upon him, and often he looked with a horrible ex-
pectation into the faces of those who passed by,
afraid lest his own senses gave him false intelli-
gence, and that he had really assumed some fright-

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The Hill of Dreams

ful and revolting shape. It was curious that, partly
by his own fault, and largely, no doubt, through
the operation of mere coincidence, he was once or
twice strongly confirmed in this fantastic delusion.
He came one day into a lonely and unfrequented by-
way, a country lane falling into ruin, but still fringed
with elms that had formed an avenue leading to the
old manor-house. It was now the road of commun-
ication between two far outlying suburbs, and on
these winter nights lay as black, dreary, and desolate
as a mountain track. Soon after the frost began, a
gentleman had been set upon in this lane as he
picked his way between the corner where the bus
had set him down, and his home where the fire was
blazing, and his wife watched the clock. He was
stumbling uncertainly through the gloom, growing
a little nervous because the walk seemed so long,
and peering anxiously for the lamp at the end of his
street, when the two footpads rushed at him out of
the fog. One caught him from behind, the other
struck him with a heavy bludgeon, and as he lay
senseless they robbed him of his watch and money,
and vanished across the fields. The next morning
all the suburb rang with the story; the unfortunate
merchant had been grievously hurt, and wives
watched their husbands go out in the morning with
sickening apprehension, not knowing what might
happen at night. Lucian of course was ignorant of

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The Hill of Dreams

all these rumours, and struck into the gloomy by-
road without caring where he was or whither the
way would lead him.

He had been driven out that day as with whips,
another hopeless attempt to return to the work
had agonised him, and existence seemed an intoler-
able pain. As he entered the deeper gloom, where
the fog hung heavily, he began, half consciously, to
gesticulate; he felt convulsed with torment and
shame, and it was a sorry relief to clench his nails
into his palm and strike the air as he stumbled
heavily along, bruising his feet against the frozen
ruts and ridges. His impotence was hideous, he
said to himself, and he cursed himself and his life,
breaking out into a loud oath, and stamping on the
ground. Suddenly he was shocked at a scream of
terror, it seemed in his very ear, and looking up
he saw for a moment a woman gazing at him out
of the mist, her features distorted and stiff with
fear. A momentary convulsion twitched her arms
into the ugly mimicry of a beckoning gesture, and
she turned and ran for dear life, howling like a
beast.

Lucian stood still in the road while the woman's
cries grew faint and died away. His heart was
chilled within him as the significance of this strange
incident became clear. He remembered nothing of
his violent gestures; he had not known at the time
that he had sworn out loud, or that he was grind-

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The Hill of Dreams

ing his teeth with impotent rage. He only thought
of that ringing scream, of the horrible fear on the
white face that had looked upon him, of the woman's
headlong flight from his presence. He stood trem-
bling and shuddering, and in a little while he was-
feeling his face, searching for some loathsome mark,
for the stigmata of evil branding his forehead. He
staggered homewards like a drunken man, and when
he came into the Uxbridge Road some children saw
him and called after him as he swayed and caught
at the lamp-post. When he got to his room he sat
down at first in the dark. He did not dare to
light the gas. Everything in the room was indis-
tinct, but he shut his eyes as he passed the dressing-
table, and sat in a corner, his face turned to the
wall. And when at last he gathered courage and the
flame leapt hissing from the jet, he crept piteously
towards the glass, and ducked his head, crouching
miserably, and struggling with his terrors before
he could look at his own image.

To the best of his power he tried to deliver him-
self from these more grotesque fantasies; he as-
sured himself that there was nothing terrific in his
countenance but sadness, that his face was like the
face of other men. Yet he could not forget that
reflection he had seen in the woman's eyes, how the
surest mirrors had shown him a horrible dread,
her soul itself quailing and shuddering at an awful
sight. Her scream rang and rang in his ears; she

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The Hill of Dreams

had fled away from him as if he offered some fate
darker than death.

He looked again and again into the glass, tortured
by a hideous uncertainty. His senses told him there
was nothing amiss, yet he had had a proof, and yet,
as he peered more earnestly, there was, it seemed,
something strange and not altogether usual in the
expression of the eyes. Perhaps it might be the
unsteady flare of the gas, or perhaps a flaw in the
cheap looking-glass, that gave some slight distor-
tion to the image. He walked briskly up and down
the room and tried to gaze steadily, indifferently,
into his own face. He would not allow himself to
be misguided by a word. Wh jn he had pronounced
himself incapable of humanity, he had only meant
that he could not enjoy the simplest things of com-
mon life. A man was not necessarily monstrous,
surrounded by a red halo of malediction, merely be-
cause he did not appreciate high tea, a quiet chat
about the neighbours, and a happy noisy evening with
the children. But with what message, then, did he
appear charged that the woman's mouth grew so
stark? Her hands had jerked up as if they had
been pulled with frantic wires; she seemed for the
instant like a horrible puppet. Her scream was
a thing from the nocturnal Sabbath.

He lit a candle and held it close up to the glass
so that his own face glared white at him, and the
reflection of the room became an indistinct dark-

190

The Hill of Dreams

ness. He saw nothing but the candle flame and
his own shining eyes, and surely they were not as
the eyes of common men. As he put down the light,
a sudden suggestion entered his mind, and he drew
a quick breath, amazed at the thought. He hardly
knew whether to rejoice or to shudder. For the
thought he conceived was this: that he had mis-
taken all the circumstances of the adventure, and
had perhaps repulsed a sister who would have wel-
comed him to the Sabbath.

He lay awake all night, turning from one dreary
and frightful thought to the other, scarcely dozing
for a few hours when the dawn came. He tried for
a moment to argue with himself when he got up;
knowing that his true life was locked up in the
bureau, he made a desperate attempt to drive the
phantoms and hideous shapes from his mind. He
was assured that his salvation was in the work, and
he drew the key from his pocket, and made as if
he would have opened the desk. But the nausea,
the remembrances of repeated and utter failures,
were too powerful. For many days he hung about
the Manor Lane, half dreading, half desiring an-
other meeting, and he swore he would not again
mistake the cry of rapture, nor repulse the arms ex-
tended in a frenzy of delight. In those days he
dreamed of some dark place where they might cele-
brate and make the marriage of the Sabbath, with
such rites as he had dared imagine.

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The Hill of Dreams

It was perhaps only the shock of a letter from
his father that rescued him from these evident
approaches to madness. Mr. Taylor wrote how
they had missed him at Christmas, how the farmers
had inquired after him, of the homely familiar
things that recalled his boyhood, his mother's voice,
the friendly fireside, and the good old fashions that
had nurtured him. He remembered that he had
once been a boy, loving the cake and puddings and
the radiant holly, and all the seventeenth-century
mirth that lingered on in the ancient farm-houses.
And there came to him the holy memory of Mass
on Christmas morning. How sweet the dark and
frosty earth had smelt as he walked beside his
mother down the winding lane, and from the stile
near the church they had seen the world glimmer-
ing to the dawn, and the wandering lanthorns ad-
vancing across the fields. Then he had come into
the church and seen it shining with candles and holly,
and his father in pure vestments of white linen
sang the longing music of the liturgy at the altar,
and the people answered him, till the sun rose with
the grave notes of the Paternoster, and a red beam
stole though the chancel window.

The worst horror left him as he recalled the mem-
ory of these dear and holy things. He cast away
the frightful fancy that the scream he had heard
was a shriek of joy, that the arms, rigidly jerked
out, invited him to an embrace. Indeed, the

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The Hill of Dreams

thought that he had longed for such an obscene
illusion, that he had gloated over the recollection of
that stark mouth, filled him with disgust. He re^
solved that his senses were deceived, that he had
neither seen nor heard, but had for a moment ex-
ternalized his own slumbering and morbid dreams.
It was perhaps necessary that he should be wretched,
that his efforts should be discouraged, but he would
not yield utterly to madness.

Yet when he went abroad with such good reso-
lutions, it was hard to resist an influence that seemed
to come from without and within. He did not
know it, but people were everywhere talking of the
great frost, of the fog that lay heavy on London,
making the streets dark and terrible, of strange
birds that came fluttering about the windows in the
silent squares. The Thames rolled out duskily
bearing down the jarring ice-blocks, and as one
looked on the black water from the bridges it was
like a river in a northern tale. To Lucian it all
seemed mythical, of the same substance as his own
fantastic thoughts. He rarely saw a newspaper,
and did not follow from day to day the systematic
readings of the thermometer, the reports of ice-
fairs, of coaches driven across the river at Hampton,
of the skating on the fens; and hence the iron roads,
the beleagured silence and the heavy folds of mist
appeared as amazing as a picture, significant, appall-
ing. He could not look out and see a common sub-

193

The Hill of Dreams

urban street foggy and dull, nor think of the inhabi-
tants as at work or sitting cheerfully eating nuts
about their fires; he saw a vision of a grey road
vanishing, of dim houses all empty and deserted,
and the silence seemed eternal. And when he went
out and passed through street after street, all void,
by the vague shapes of houses that appeared for a
moment and were then instantly swallowed up, it
seemed to him as if he had strayed into a city
that had suffered some inconceivable doom, that
he alone wandered where myriads had once dwelt.
It was a town great as Babylon, terrible as Rome,
marvellous as Lost Atlantis, set in the midst of a
white wilderness surrounded by waste places. It
was impossible to escape from it; if he skulked be-
tween hedges, and crept away beyond the frozen
pools, presently the serried stony lines confronted
him like an army, and far they swept away into the
night, as some fabled wall that guards an empire
in the vast dim east. Or in that distorting medium
of the mist, changing all things, he imagined that
he trod an infinite desolate plain, abandoned from
ages, but circled and encircled with dolmen and
menhir that loomed out at him, gigantic, terrible.
All London was one grey temple of an awful rite,
ring within ring of wizard stones circled about
some central place, every circle was an initiation,
every initiation eternal loss. Or perhaps he was
astray forever in a land of grey rocks. He had

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The Hill of Dreams

seen the light of home, the flicker of the fire on
the walls; close at hand, it seemed, was the open
door, and he had heard dear voices calling to him
across the gloom, but he had just missed the path.
The lamps vanished, the voices sounded thin and
4ied away, and yet he knew that those within
were waiting, that they could not bear to close
the door, but waited, calling his name, while he
had missed the way, and wandered in the pathless
desert of the grey rocks. Fantastic, hideous, they
beset him wherever he turned, piled up into strange
shapes, pricked with sharp peaks, assuming the ap-
pearance of goblin towers, swelling into a vague
dome like a fairy rath, huge and terrible. And as
one dream faded into another, so these last fancies
were perhaps the most tormenting and persistent;
the rocky avenues became the camp and fortalice
of some half-human, malignant race who swarmed
in hiding, ready to bear him away into the heart of
their horrible hills. It was awful to think that
all his goings were surrounded, that in the darkness
he was watched and surveyed, that every step but
led him deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

When, of an evening, he was secure in his room,
the blind drawn down and the gas flaring, he made
vigorous efforts towards sanity. It was not of his
free will that he allowed terror to over-master him,
and he desired nothing better than a placid and harm-
less life, full of work and clear thinking. He knew

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The Hill of Dreams

that he deluded himself with imagination, that he
had been walking through London suburbs and not
through Pandemonium, and that if he could but
unlock his bureau all those ugly forms would be
resolved into the mist. But it was hard to say if
he consoled himself effectually with such reflections,
for the return to common sense meant also the re-
turn to the sharp pangs of defeat. It recalled him
to the bitter theme of his own inefficiency, to the
thought that he only desired one thing of life, and
that this was denied him. He was willing to endure
the austerities of a monk in a severe cloister, to suf-
fer cold, to be hungry, to be lonely and friendless, to
forbear all the consolation of friendly speech, and
to be glad of all these things, if only he might be
allowed to illuminate the manuscript in quietness.
It seemed a hideous insufferable cruelty, that he
should so fervently desire that which he could never
gain.

He was led back to the old conclusion; he had
lost the sense of humanity, he was wretched be-
cause he was an alien and a stranger amongst
citizens. It seemed probable that the enthusiasm
of literature, as he understood it, the fervent desire
for the fine art, had in it something of the inhuman
and dissevered the enthusiast from his fellow-crea-
tures. It was possible that the barbarian suspected
as much, that by some slow process of rumination
he had arrived at his fixed and inveterate hatred of

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The Hill of Dreams

all artists. It was no doubt a dim unconscious im-
pression, by no means a clear reasoned conviction;
the average Philistine, if pressed for the reasons
of his dislike, would either become inarticulate,
ejaculating 'faugh' and 'pah' like an old-fashioned
Scots Magazine, or else he would give some imagi-
nary and absurd reason, alleging that all 'littery men'
were poor, that composers never cut their hair, that
painters were rarely public-school men, that sculp-
tors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their
lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere after-
thoughts; the average man hated the artist from
a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange,
uncanny, alien to his nature; he gibbered, uttered
his harsh, semi-bestial 'faugh,' and dismissed Keats
to his gallipots from much the same motives as
usually impelled the black savage to dismiss the
white man on an even longer journey.

Lucian was not especially interested in this hatred
of the barbarian for the maker, except from this
point, that it confirmed him in his belief that the
love of art dissociated the man from the race. One
touch of art made the whole world alien, but surely
the miseries of the civilised man cast amongst sav-
ages were not so much caused by dread of their fe-
rocity as by the terror of his own loneliness. He
feared their spears less than his own thoughts; he
would perhaps in his last despair leave his retreat
and go forth to perish at their hands, so that he

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The Hill of Dreams

might at least die in company, and hear the sound of
speech before death. And Lucian felt most keenly
that in his case there was a double curse; he was as
isolated as Keats, and as inarticulate as his review-
ers. The consolation of the work had failed him,
and he was suspended in the void between two
worlds.

It was no doubt the composite effect of his fail-
ures, his loneliness of soul, and solitude of life,
that had made him invest those common streets
with such grim and persistent terrors. He had per-
haps yielded to a temptation without knowing that
he had been tempted, and, in the manner of De
Quincey, had chosen the subtle in exchange for the
more tangible pains. Unconsciously, but still of
free will, he had preferred the splendour and the
gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal
pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence.
It was better to dwell in vague melancholy, to stray
in the forsaken streets of a city doomed from ages,
to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than
to awake to a gnawing and ignoble torment, to con-
fess that a house of business would have been more
suitable and more practical, that he had promised
what he could never perform. Even as he struggled
to beat back the phantasmagoria of the mist, and
resolved that he would no longer make all the
streets a stage of apparitions; he hardly realised
what he had done, or that the ghosts he had called
might depart and return again.

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The Hill of Dreams

He continued his long walks, always with the
object of producing a physical weariness and ex-
haustion that would enable him to sleep of nights.
But even when he saw the foggy and deserted ave-
nues in their proper shape, and allowed his eyes to
catch the pale glimmer of the lamps, and the dancing
flame of the firelight, he could not rid himself of the
impression that he stood afar off, that between
those hearths and himself there was a great gulf
fixed. As he paced down the footpath he could
often see plainly across the frozen shrubs into the
homely and cheerful rooms. Sometimes, late in
the evening, he caught a passing glimpse of the
family at tea, father, mother, and children laugh-
ing and talking together, well pleased with each
other's company. Sometimes a wife or a child was
standing by the garden gate peering anxiously
through the fog, and the sight of it all, all the little
details, the hideous but comfortable armchairs
turned ready to the fire, maroon-red curtains being
drawn close to shut out the ugly night, the sudden
blaze and illumination as the fire was poked up so
that it might be cheerful for father; these trivial
and common things were acutely significant. They
brought back to him the image of a dead boy —
himself. They recalled the shabby old 'parlour'
in the country, with its shabby old furniture and
fading carpet, and renewed a whole atmosphere of
affection and homely comfort. His mother would

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The Hill of Dreams

walk to the end of the drive and look out for
him when he was late, (wandering then about
the dark woodlands) ; on winter evenings she would
make the fire blaze, and have his slippers warming
by the hearth, and there was probably buttered
toast 'as a treat.' He dwelt on all these insignifi-
cant petty circumstances, on the genial glow and
light after the muddy winter lanes, on the relish of
the buttered toast and the smell of the hot tea, on
the two old cats curled fast asleep before the fender,
and made them instruments of exquisite pain and
regret. Each of these strange houses that he passed
was identified in his mind with his own vanished
home ; all was prepared and ready as in the old days,
but he was shut out, judged and condemned to
wander in the frozen mist, with weary feet, an-
guished and forlorn, and they would pass from
within to help him could not, neither could he pass
to them. Again, for the hundredth time, he came
back to the sentence, he could not gain the art of
letters and he had lost the art of humanity. He
saw the vanity of all his thoughts ; he was an ascetic
caring nothing for warmth and cheerfulness and the
small comforts of life, and yet he allowed his mind
to dwell on such things. If one of those passers-by,
who walked briskly, eager for home, should have
pitied him by some miracle and asked him to come
in, it would have been worse than useless, yet he
longed for pleasures that he could not have enjoyed.

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It was as if he were come to a place of torment,
where they who could not drink longed for water,
where they who could feel no warmth shuddered in
the eternal cold. He was oppressed by the grim
conceit that he himself still slept within the matted
thicket, imprisoned by the green bastions of the
Roman fort. He had never come out, but a
changeling had gone down the hill, and now stirred
about the earth.

Beset by such ingenious terrors, it was not won-
derful that outward events and common incidents
should abet his fancies. He had succeeded one day
in escaping from the mesh of the streets, and fell
on a rough and narrow lane that stole into a little
valley. For the moment he was in a somewhat
happier mood; the afternoon sun glowed through
the rolling mist, and the air grew clearer. He saw
quiet and peaceful fields, and a wood descending in
a gentle slope from an old farmstead of warm red
brick. The farmer was driving the slow cattle home
from the hill, and his loud halloo to his dog came
across the land a cheerful mellow note. From an-
other side a cart was approaching the clustered
barns, hesitating, pausing while the great horses
rested, and then starting again into lazy motion.
In the well of the valley a wandering line of bushes
showed where a brook crept in and out amongst the
meadows, and, as Lucian stood, lingering, on the
bridge, a soft and idle breath ruffled though the

2O I

The Hill of Dreams

boughs of a great elm. He felt soothed, as by
calm music, and wondered whether it would not be
better for him to live in some such quiet place, with-
in reach of the streets and yet remote from them.
It seemed a refuge from ill thoughts; he could
imagine himself sitting at rest beneath the black
yew tree in the farm garden, at the close of
a summer day. He had almost determined that
he would knock at the door and ask if they would
take him as a lodger, when he saw a child running
towards him down the lane. It was a little girl,
with bright curls tossing about her head, and, as
she came on, the sunlight glowed upon her, illu-
minating her brick-red frock and the yellow king-
cups in her hat. She had run with her eyes on the
ground, chirping and laughing to herself, and did
not see Lucian till she was quite near him. She
started and glanced into his eyes for a moment,
and began to cry; he stretched out his hand, and
she ran from him screaming, frightened no doubt by
what was to her a sudden and strange apparition.
He turned back towards London, and the mist
folded him in its thick darkness, for on that evening
it was tinged with black.

It was only by the intensest strain of resolution
that he did not yield utterly to the poisonous ano-
dyne which was always at his hand. It had been a
difficult struggle to escape from the mesh of the
hills, from the music of the fauns, and even now

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he was drawn by the memory of these old allure-
ments. But he felt that here, in his loneliness, he
he was in greater danger, and beset by a blacker
magic. Horrible fancies rushed wantonly into his
mind; he was not only ready to believe that some-
thing in his soul sent a shudder through all that was
simple and innocent, but he came trembling home
one Saturday night, believing, or half-believing,
that he was in communion with evil. He had passed
through the clamorous and blatant crowd of the
'high street,' where, as one climbed the hill, the
shops seemed all aflame, and the black night air
glowed with the flaring gas-jets and the naphtha-
lamps, hissing and wavering before the February
wind. Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were
belched out of the blazing public-houses as the
doors swung to and fro, and above these doors were
hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a
violent blast of air, so that they might have been
infernal thuribles, censing the people. Some man
was calling his wares in one long continuous shriek
that never stopped or paused, and, as a respond,
a deeper, louder voice roared to him from across
the road. An Italian whirled the handle of his
piano-organ in a fury, and a ring of imps danced
mad figures around him, danced and flung up their
legs till the rags dropped from some of them, and
they still danced on. A flare of naphtha, burning
with a rushing noise, threw a light on one point of

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the circle, and Lucian watched a lank girl of fifteen
as she came round and round to the flash. She was
quite drunk, and had kicked her petticoats away,
and the crowd howled laughter and applause
at her. Her black hair poured down and leapt
on her scarlet bodice; she sprang and leapt round
the ring, laughing in Bacchic frenzy, and led the
orgy to triumph. People were crossing to and fro,
jostling against each other, swarming about certain
shops and stalls in a dense dark mass that quivered
and sent out feelers as if it were one writhing or-
ganism. A little farther a group of young men,
arm in arm, were marching down the roadway
chanting some music-hall verse in full chorus, so
that it sounded like plainsong. An impossible hub-
bub, a hum of voices angry as swarming bees, the
squeals of five or six girls who ran in and out, dived
up dark passages and darted back into the crowd;
all these mingled together till his ears quivered.
A young fellow was playing the concertina, and he
touched the keys with such slow fingers that the
tune wailed solemn into a dirge; but there was
nothing so strange as the burst of sound that
swelled out when the public-house doors were
opened.

He walked amongst these people, looked at
their faces, and looked at the children amongst
them. He had come thinking that he would see
the English working class, 'the best-behaved and

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the best-tempered crowd in the world,' enjoying the
simple pleasure of the Saturday night's shopping.
Mother bought the joint for Sunday's dinner, and
perhaps a pair of boots for father; father had an
honest glass of beer, and the children were given
bags of sweets, and then all these worthy people
went decently home to their well-earned rest. De
Quincey had enjoyed the sight in his day, and had
studied the rise and fall of onions and potatoes.
Lucian, indeed, had desired to take these simple
emotions as an opiate, to forget the fine fret and
fantastic trouble of his own existence in plain things
and the palpable joy of rest after labor. He was
only afraid lest he should be too sharply re-
proached by the sight of these men who fought
bravely year after year against starvation, who
knew nothing of intricate and imagined grief, but
only the weariness of relentless labour, of the
long battle for their wives and children. It would
be pathetic, he thought, to see them content with
so little, brightened by the expectation of a day's
rest and a good dinner, forced, even then, to reckon
every penny, and to make their children laugh
with halfpence. Either he would be ashamed be-
fore so much content, or else he would be again
touched by the sense of his inhumanity which could
take no interest in the common things of life. But
still he went to be at least taken out of himself, to be
forced to look at another side of the world, so that

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he might perhaps forget for a little while his own
sorrows.

He was fascinated by what he saw and heard.
He wondered whether De Quincey also had seen
the same spectacle, and had concealed his impres-
sions out of reverence for the average reader.
Here there were no simple joys of honest toilers,
but wonderful orgies, that drew out his heart to
horrible music. At first the violence of sound
and sight had overwhelmed him; the lights flaring
in the night wind, the array of naphtha lamps, the
black shadows, the roar of voices. The dance
about the piano-organ had been the first sign of an
inner meaning, and the face of the dark girl as she
came round and round to the flame had been
amazing in its utter furious abandon. And what
songs they were singing all around him, and what
terrible words rang out, only to excite peals of
laughter. In the public-houses, the workmen's wives,
the wives of small tradesmen, decently dressed in
black, were drinking their faces to a flaming red,
and urging their husbands to drink more. Beauti-
ful young women, flushed and laughing, put their
arms round the men's necks and kissed them, and
then held up the glass to their lips. In the dark
corners, at the openings of side streets, the children
were talking together, instructing each other, whis-
pering what they had seen ; a boy of fifteen was ply-
ing a girl of twelve with whisky, and presently they

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crept away. Lucian passed them as they turned
to go, and both looked at him. The boy laughed,
and the girl smiled quietly. It was above all in
the faces around him that he saw the most astound-
ing things, the Bacchic fury unveiled and un-
ashamed. To his eyes it seemed as if these
revellers recognized him as a fellow, and smiled up
in his face, aware that he was in the secret. Every
instinct of religion, of civilisation even, was swept
away; they gazed at one another and at him ab-
solved of all scruples, children of the earth and
nothing more. Now and then a couple detached
themselves from the swarm, and went away into
the darkness, answering the jeers and laughter of
their friends as they vanished.

On the edge of the pavement, not far from where
he was standing, Lucian noticed a tall and lovely
young woman who seemed to be alone. She was
in the full light of a naphtha flame, and her bronze
hair and flushed cheeks shone illuminate as she
veiwed the orgy. She had dark brown eyes, and
a strange look as of an old picture in her face; and
her eyes brightened with an argent gleam. He saw
the revellers nudging each other and glancing at
her, and two or three young men went up and asked
her to come for a walk. She shook her head and
said 'No thank you' again and again, and seemed
as if she were looking for somebody in the crowd.

Tm expecting a friend,' she said at last to a man
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who proposed a drink and walk afterwards; and
Lucian wondered what kind of friend would ul-
timately appear. Suddenly she turned to him as he
was about to pass on, and said in a low voice:

'I'll go for a walk with you if you like; you just
go on, and I'll follow in a minute.'

For a moment he looked steadily at her. He saw
that the first glance had misled him; her face was
not flushed with drink as he had supposed, but it
was radiant with the most exquisite colour, a red
flame glowed and died on her cheek, and seemed
to palpitate as she spoke. The head was set on
the neck nobly, as in a statue, and about the ears
the bronze hair strayed into little curls. She was
smiling and waiting for his answer.

He muttered something about being very sorry,
and fled down the hill out of the orgy, from the noise
of roaring voices and the glitter of the great lamps
very slowly swinging in the blast of wind. He knew
that he had touched the brink of utter destruction;
there was death in the woman's face, and she had
indeed summoned him to the Sabbath. Somehow he
had been able to refuse on the instant, but if he had
delayed he knew he would have abandoned himself
to her body and soul. He locked himself in his
room and lay trembling on the bed, wondering if
some subtle sympathy had shown the woman her
perfect companion. He looked in the glass, not ex-
pecting now to see certain visible and outward signs,

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The Hill of Dreams

but searching for the meaning of that strange glance
that lit up his eyes. He had grown even thinner
than before in the last few months, and his cheeks
were wasted with hunger and sorrow, but there were
still about his features the suggestion of a curious
classic grace, and the look as of a faun who has
stayed from the vineyards and olive gardens. He
had broken away, but now he felt the mesh of her
net about him, a desire for her that was a madness
as if she held every nerve in his body and drew him
to her, to her mystic world, to the rosebush where
every flower was a flame.

He dreamed all night of the perilous things he
had refused, and it was loss to awake in the morn-
ing, pain to return to the world. The frost had
broken and the fog had rolled away, and the grey
street was filled with a clear grey light. Again
he looked out on the long dull sweep of the mo-
notonous houses, hidden for the past weeks by a
curtain of mist. Heavy rain had fallen in the night,
and the garden rails were still dripping, the roofs
still dark with wet, all down the line the dingy white
blinds were drawn in the upper windows. Not a
soul walked the street; every one was asleep after
the exertions of the night before ; even on the main
road it was only at intervals that some straggler
paddled by. Presently a woman in a brown ulster
shuffled off on some errand, then a man in shirt-
sleeves poked out his head, holding the door half-

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open, and stared up at a window opposite. After
a few minutes he slunk in again, and three loafers
came slouching down the street, eager for mischief
or beastliness of some sort. They chose a house
that seemed rather smarter than the rest, and, ir-
ritated by the neat curtains, the little grass plot
with its dwarf shrub, one of the ruffians drew out
a piece of chalk and wrote some words on the
front door. His friends kept watch for him, and
the adventure achieved, all three bolted, bellow-
ing yahoo laughter Then a bell began, tang, tang,
tang, and here and there children appeared on their
way to Sunday-school, and the chapel 'teachers' went
by with verjuice eyes and lips, scowling at the little
boy who cried 'Piper, piper!' On the main road
many respectable people, the men shining and ill-
fitted, the women hideously bedizened, passed in
the direction of the Independent nightmare, the
stuccoed thing with Doric columns, but on the whole
life was stagnant. Presently Lucian smelt the
horrid fumes of roast beef and cabbage; the early
risers were preparing the one-o'clock meal, but many
lay in bed and put off dinner till three, with the
effect of prolonging the cabbage atmosphere into
the late afternoon. A drizzly rain began as the
people were coming out of church, and the mothers
of little boys in velvet and little girls in foolishness
of every kind were impelled to slap their offspring,
and to threaten them with father. Then the torpor

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of beef and cabbage settled down on the street; in
some houses they snored and read the Parish Mag-
azine, in some they snorted and read the murders
and collected filth of the week; but the only move-
ment of the afternoon was a second procession of
children, now bloated and distended with food,
again answering the summons of tang, tang, tang.
On the main road the trams, laden with impossible
people, went humming to and fro, and young men
who wore bright blue ties cheerfully haw-hawed and
smoked penny cigars. They annoyed the shiny and
respectable and verjuice-lipped, not by the frightful
stench of the cigars, but because they were cheer-
ful on Sunday. By and by the children, having
heard about Moses in the Bulrushes and Daniel in
the Lion's Den, came straggling home in an evil
humour. And all the day it was as if on a grey
sheet gray shadows flickered, passing by.

And in the rose-garden every flower was a flame !
He thought in symbols, using the Persian imagery
of a dusky court, surrounded by white cloisters,
gilded by gates of bronze. The stars came out,
the sky glowed a darker violet, but the cloistered
wall, the fantastic trellises in stone, shone whiter.
It was like a hedge of may-blossom, like a lily within
a cup of lapis-lazuli, like sea-foam tossed on the
heaving sea at dawn. Always those white cloisters
trembled with the lute music, always the garden
sang with the clear fountain, rising and falling in

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The Hill of Dreams

the mysterious dusk. And there was a singing
voice stealing through the white lattices and the
bronze gates, a soft voice chanting of the Lover
and the Beloved, of the Vineyard, of the Gate and
the Way. Oh! the language was unknown; but
the music of the refrain returned again, and again,
swelling and trembling through the white nets of the
latticed cloisters. And every rose in the dusky air
was a flame.

The shadowy air was full of the perfume of
eastern things. The attar of roses must have been
sprinkled in the fountain; the odour seemed to pal-
pitate in the nostrils, as the music and singing on
the ears. A thin spire of incense rose from a rich
brass censer, and floated in filmy whorls across the
oleander blossoms. And there were hints of
strange drugs, the scent of opium and asrar, breath-
ing deep reverie and the joy of long meditation.
The white walls, the latticed cloisters of the court,
seemed to advance and retreat, to flush and pale as
the stars brightened and grew larger into silver
worlds; all the faerywork of the chancelled stone
hovered and glimmered beneath the sky, dark as
the violet, dark as wine. The singing voice swelled
to rapture and passion as the song chanted the
triumph of the Lover and the Beloved, how their
souls were melted together as the juice of the grape
is mingled in the vintage, how they found the Gate
and the Way. And all the blossoms in the dusky

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air, all the flowers in the garden, all the roses upon
the tree, were aflame.

He had seen the life which he expressed by these
symbols offered to him, and he had refused it; and
he was alone in the grey street, with its lamps just
twinkling through the dreary twilight, the blast
of a ribald chorus sounding from the main road,
a doggerel hymn whining from some parlour, to the
accompaniment of the harmonium. He wondered
why he had turned away from that woman who
knew all secrets, in whose eyes were all the myster-
ies. He opened the desk of his bureau, and was con-
fronted by the heap and litter of papers, lying in
confusion as he had left them. He knew that there
was a motive of his refusal; he had been unwilling
to abandon all hope of the work. The glory and
the torment of his ambition glowed upon him as he
looked at the manuscript; it seemed so pitiful that
such a single desire should be thwarted. He was
aware that if he chose to sit down now before the
desk he could, in a manner, write easily enough —
he could produce a tale which would be formally
well constructed and certain of favorable recep-
tion. And it would not be the utterly common-
place, entirely hopeless favourite of the circulating
library; it would stand in those ranks where the
real thing is skilfully counterfeited, amongst the
books which give the reader his orgy of emotions,
and yet contrive to be superior, and 'art,' in his

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opinion. Lucian had often observed this species
of triumph, and had noted the acclamation that
never failed the clever sham, the literary lie.
Romola, for example, had made the great host of
the serious, the portentous, shout for joy, while
the real book, The Cloister and the Hearth, was
a comparative failure.

He knew that he could write a Romola; but he
thought the art of counterfeiting half-crowns less
detestable than this shabby trick of imitating
literature. He had refused definitely to enter the
atelier of the gentleman who pleased his clients
by ingeniously simulating the grain of walnut; and
though he had seen the old oaken aumbry kicked
out contemptuously into the farmyard, serving per-
haps the necessities of hens or pigs, he would not
apprentice himself to the masters of veneer. He
paced up and down the room, glancing now and
again at his papers, and wondering if there were
no hope for him. A great thing he could never
do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine
sincere and genuine pages.

He was stirred again to this fury for the work
by the event of the evening before, by all that had
passed through his mind since the melancholy dawn.
The lurid picture of that fiery street, the flaming
shops and flaming glances, all its wonders and
horrors, lit by the naphtha flares and by the burn-
ing souls, had possessed him; and the noises, the

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The Hill of Dreams

shriek and the whisper, the jangling rattle of the
piano-organ, the long-continued scream of the
butcher as he dabbled in the blood, the lewd litany
of the singers, these seemed to be resolved into an
infernal overture, loud with the expectation of lust
and death. And how the spectacle was set in the
cloud of dark night, a phantom play acted on that
fiery stage, beneath those hideous brassy lamps, very
slowly swinging in a violent blast. As all the
medley of outrageous sights and sounds now fused
themselves within his brain into one clear impres-
sion, it seemed that he had indeed witnessed and
acted in a drama, that all the scene had been pre-
pared and vested for him, and that the choric songs
he had heard were but preludes to a greater act.
For in that woman was the consummation and ca-
tastrophe of it all, and the whole stage waited for
their meeting. He fancied that after this the
voices and the lights died away, that the crowd sank
swiftly into the darkness, and that the street was at
once denuded of the great lamps and of all its awful
scenic apparatus.

Again, he thought, the same mystery would be
represented before him; suddenly on some dark and
gloomy night, as he wandered lonely on a deserted
road, the wind hurrying before him, suddenly a turn
would bring him again upon the fiery stage, and the
antique drama would be reenacted. He would be
drawn to the same place, to find that woman still

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The Hill of Dreams

standing there; again he would watch the rose
radiant and palpitating upon her cheek, the argent
gleam in her brown eyes, the bronze curls gilding
the white splendour of her neck. And for the
second time she would freely offer herself. He
could hear the wail of the singers swelling to a
shriek, and see the dusky dancers whirling round in
a faster frenzy, and the naphtha flares tinged with
red, as the woman and he went away into the dark,
into the cloistered court where every flower was a
flame, whence he would never come out.

His only escape was in the desk; he might find
salvation if could again hide his heart in the heap
and litter of papers, and again be rapt by the
cadence of a phrase. He threw open his window
and looked out on the dim world and the glimmering
amber lights. He resolved that he would rise early
in the morning, and seek once more for his true life
in the work.

But there was a strange thing. There was a
little bottle on the mantelpiece, a bottle of dark
blue glass, and he trembled and shuddered before
it, as if it were a fetish.

216

VII

IT was very dark in the room. He seemed by
slow degrees to awake from a long and heavy
torpor, from an utter forgetfulness, and as he
raised his eyes he could scarcely discern the pale
whiteness of the paper on the desk before him. He
remembered something of a gloomy winter after-
noon, of driving rain, of gusty wind: he had fallen
asleep over his work, no doubt, and the night had
come down.

He lay back in his chair, wondering whether it
were late; his eyes were half closed and he did not
make the effort and rouse himself. He could hear
the stormy noise of the wind, and the sound re-
minded him of the half-forgotten days. He
thought of his boyhood, and the old rectory, and
the great elms that surrounded it. There was
something pleasant in the consciousness that he was
still half dreaming; he knew he could wake up when-
ever he pleased, but for the moment he amused him-
self by the pretense that he was a little boy again,
tired with his rambles and the keen air of the hills.
He remembered how he would sometimes wake up
in the dark at midnight, and listen sleepily for a

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The Hill of Dreams

moment to the rush of the wind straining and crying
amongst the elms, and hear it beat upon the walls,
and then he would fall to dreams again, happy in
his warm, snug bed.

The wind blew louder, and the windows rattled.
He half opened his eyes and shut them again, de-
termined to cherish that sensation of long ago.
He felt tired and heavy with sleep; he imagined
that he was exhausted by some effort; he had, per-
haps, been writing furiously, without rest. He
could not recollect at the instant what the work
had been; it would be delightful to read the pages
when he made up his mind to bestir himself.

Surely that was the noise of boughs, swaying
and grinding in the wind. He remembered one
night at home when such a sound had roused him
suddenly from a deep sweet sleep. There was a
rushing and beating as of wings upon the air, and
a heavy dreary noise, like thunder far away upon
the mountain. He had got out of bed and looked
from behind the blind to see what was abroad. He
remembered the strange sight he had seen, and he
pretended it would be just the same if he cared
to look out now. There were clouds flying awfully
from before the moon, and a pale light that made
the familiar land look strange and terrible. The
blast of wind came with a great shriek, and the
trees tossed and bowed and quivered; the wood
was scourged and horrible, and the night air was

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The Hill of Dreams

ghastly with a confused tumult, and voices as of a
host. A huge black cloud rolled across the heaven
from the west and covered up the moon, and there
came a torrent of bitter hissing rain.

It was all a vivid picture to him as he sat in his
chair, unwilling to wake. Even as he let his mind
stray back to that night of the past years, the rain
beat sharply on the window-panes, and though there
were no trees in the grey suburban street, he heard
distinctly the crash of boughs. He wandered
vaguely from thought to thought, groping indis-
tinctly among memories, like a man trying to cross
from door to door in a darkened unfamiliar room.
But, no doubt, if he were to look out, by some magic
the whole scene would be displayed before him.
He would not see the curve of monotonous two-
storied houses, with here and there a white blind,
a patch of light, and shadows appearing and vanish-
ing, not the rain plashing in the muddy road, not
the amber of the gas-lamp opposite, but the wild
moonlight poured on the dearly loved country; far
away the dim circle of the hills and woods and
beneath him the tossing trees about the lawn, and
the wood heaving under the fury of the wind.

He smiled to himself, amidst his lazy medita-
tions, to think how real it seemed, and yet it was all
far away, the scenery of an old play long ended and
forgotten. It was strange that after all these years
of trouble and work and change he should be in

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The Hill of Dreams

any sense the same person as that little boy peep-
ing out, half frightened, from the rectory window.
It was as if on looking in the glass one should see a
stranger, and yet know that the image was a true
reflection.

The memory of the old home recalled his father
and mother to him, and he wondered whether his
mother would come if he were to cry out suddenly.
One night, on just such a night as this, when a great
storm blew from the mountain, a tree had fallen with
a crash and a bough had struck the roof, and he
awoke in a fright, calling for his mother. She had
come and had comforted him, soothing him to sleep,
and now he shut his eyes, seeing her face shining
in the uncertain flickering candle light, as she bent
over his bed. He could not think she had died;
the memory was but a part of the evil dreams that
had come afterwards.

He said to himself that he had fallen asleep
and dreamed sorrow and agony, and he wished
to forget all the things of trouble. He would re-
turn to happy days, to the beloved land, to the
dear and friendly paths across the fields. There
was the paper, white before him, and when he
chose to stir, he would have the pleasure of read-
ing his work. He could not quite recollect what
he had been about, but he was somehow conscious
that he had been successful and had brought some
long labour to a worthy ending. Presently he would

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The Hill of Dreams

light the gas, and enjoy the satisfaction that only
the work could give him, but for the time he pre-
ferred to linger in the darkness, and to think of him-
self as straying from stile to stile through the
scented meadows, and listening to the bright brook
that sang to the alders.

It was winter now, for he heard the rain and the
wind, and the swaying of the trees, but in those
old days how sweet the summer had been. The
great hawthorn bush in blossom, like a white cloud
upon the earth, had appeared to him in the twilight,
he had lingered in the enclosed valley to hear the
nightingale, a voice swelling out from the rich
gloom, from the trees that grew around the well.
The scent of the meadowsweet was blown to him
across the bridge of years, and with it came the
dream and the hope and the longing, and the after-
glow red in the sky, and the marvel of the earth.
There was a quiet walk that he knew so well; one
went up from a little green by-road, following an
unnamed brooklet scarce a foot wide, but yet
wandering like a river, gurgling over its pebbles,
with its dwarf bushes shading the pouring water.
One went through the meadow grass, and came to
the larch wood that grew from hill to hill across
the stream, and shone a brilliant tender green, and
sent vague sweet spires to the flushing sky. Through
the wood the path wound, turning and dipping, and
beneath, the brown fallen needles of last year were

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soft and thick, and the resinous cones gave out their
odour as the warm night advanced, and the shadows
darkened. It was quite still ; but he stayed, and the
faint song of the brooklet sounded like the echo of
a river beyond the mountains. How strange it was
to look into the wood, to see the tall straight stems
rising, pillar-like, and then the dusk, uncertain, and
then the blackness. So he came out from the larch
wood, from the green cloud and the vague shadow,
into the dearest of all hollows, shut in on one side
by the larches and before him by high violent walls
of turf, like the slopes of a fort, with a clear line
dark against the twilight sky, and a weird thorn
bush that grew large, mysterious, on the summit, be-
neath the gleam of the evening star.

And he retraced his wanderings in those deep old
lanes that began from the common road and went
away towards the unknown, climbing steep hills, and
piercing the woods of shadows, and dipping down
into valleys that seemed virgin, unexplored, secret
for the foot of man. He entered such a lane not
knowing where it might bring him, hoping he had
found the way to fairyland, to the woods beyond
the world, to that vague territory that haunts all
the dreams of a boy. He could not tell where he
might be, for the high banks rose steep, and the
great hedges made a green vault above. Marvel-
lous ferns grew rich and thick in the dark red earth,
fastening their roots about the roots of hazel and

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beech and maple,- clustering like the carven capitals
of a cathedral pillar. Down, like a dark shaft, the
lane dipped to the well of the hills, and came
amongst the limestone rocks. He climbed the bank
at last, and looked out into a country that seemed
for a moment the land he sought, a mysterious realm
with unfamiliar hills and valleys and fair plains
all golden, and white houses radiant in the sunset
light.

And he thought of the steep hillsides where the
bracken was like a wood, and of bare places where
the west wind sang over the golden gorse, of still
circles in mid-lake, of the poisonous yew-tree in
the middle of the wood, shedding its crimson cups
on the dank earth. How he lingered by certain
black waterpools hedged in on every side by droop-
ing wych-elms and black-stemned alders, watching
the faint waves widening to the banks as a leaf or
twig dropped from the trees.

And the whole air and wonder of the ancient
forest came back to him. He had found his way
to the river valley, to the long lovely hollow be-
tween the hills, and went up and up beneath the
leaves in the warm hush of midsummer, glancing
back now and again through the green alleys, to the
river winding in mystic esses beneath, passing hidden
glens receiving the streams that rushed down the
hillside, ice-cold from the rock, passing the imme-
morial tumulus, the graves where the legionaries

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waited for the trumpet, the grey farmhouses send-
ing the blue wreaths of wood smoke into the still
air. He went higher and higher, till at last he
entered the long passage of the Roman road, and
from this, the ridge and summit of the wood, he
saw the waves of green swell and dip and sink to-
wards the marshy level and the gleaming yellow
sea. He looked on the surging forest, and thought
of the strange deserted city mouldering into a petty
village on its verge, of its encircling walls melting
into the turf, of vestiges of an older temple which
the earth had buried utterly.

It was winter now, for he heard the wail of the
wind, and a sudden gust drove the rain against the
panes, but he thought of the bee's song in the clover,
of the foxgloves in full blossom, of the wild roses,
delicate, enchanting, swaying on a long stem above
the hedge. He had been in strange places, he had
known sorrow and desolation, and had grown grey
and weary in the work of letters, but he lived again
in the sweetness, in the clear bright air of early
morning, when the sky was blue in June, and the
mist rolled like a white sea in the valley. He
laughed when he recollected that he had sometimes
fancied himself unhappy in those days; in those
days when he could be glad because the sun shone,
because the wind blew fresh on the mountain. On
those bright days he had been glad, looking at the
fleeting and passing of the clouds upon the hills, and

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had gone up higher on the broad dome of the moun-
tain, feeling that joy went up before him.

He remembered how, a boy, he had dreamed of
love, of an adorable and ineffable mystery which
transcended all longing and desire. The time had
come when all the wonder of the earth seemed to
prefigure this alone, when he found the symbol of
the Beloved in hill and wood and stream, and every
flower and every dark pool discoursed a pure ecstasy.
It was the longing for longing, the love of love, that
had come to him when he awoke one morning just
before the dawn, and for the first time felt the sharp
thrill of passion.

He tried in vain to express to himself the ex-
quisite joys of innocent desire. Even now, after
troubled years, in spite of some dark cloud that
overshadowed the background of his thought, the
sweetness of the boy's imagined pleasure came like
a perfume into his reverie. It was no love of a
woman but the desire of womanhood, the Eros of
the Unknown, that makes the heart tremble. He
hardly dreamed that such a love could ever be satis-
fied, that the thirst of beauty could be slaked. He
shrank from all contact of actuality, not venturing
so much as to imagine the inner place and sanctuary
of the mysteries. It was enough for him to adore
in the outer court, to know that within, in the sweet
gloom, were the vision and the rapture, the altar
and the sacrifice.

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He remembered, dimly, the passage of many
heavy years since that time of hope and passion,
but, perhaps, the vague shadow would pass away,
and he could renew the boy's thoughts, the unformed
fancies that were part of the bright day, of the
wild roses in the hedgerow. All other things should
be laid aside, he would let them trouble him no
more after this winter night. He saw now that
from the first he had allowed his imagination to be-
wilder him, to create a fantastic world in which he
suffered, moulding innocent forms into terror and
dismay. Vividly, he saw again the black circle of
oaks, growing in a haggard ring upon the bastions
of the Roman fort. The noise of the storm without
grew louder, and he thought how the wind had come
up the valley with the sound of a scream, how a
great tree had ground its boughs together, shudder-
ing before the violent blast. Clear and distinct, as
if he were standing now in the lane, he saw the
steep slopes surging from the valley, and the black
crown of the oaks set against the flaming sky,
against a blaze and glow of light as if great furnace
doors were opened. He saw the fire as it were
smitten about the bastions, about the heaped mounds
that guarded the fort, and the crooked evil boughs
seemed to writhe in the blast of flame that beat from
heaven. Strangely with the sight of the burning
fort mingled the impression of a dim white shape
floating up the dusk of the lane towards him, and

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he saw across the valley of years a girl's face, a
momentary apparition that shone and vanished
away.

Then there was a memory of another day, of
violent summer, of white farmhouse walls blazing
in the sun, and a far call from the reapers in the
cornfields. He had climbed the steep slope and
penetrated the matted thicket and lay in the heat
alone on the soft short grass that grew within the
fort. There was a cloud of madness and confu-
sion, of broken dreams that had no meaning or clue
but only an indefinable horror and defilement. He
had fallen asleep as he gazed at the knotted fan-
tastic boughs of the stunted brake about him, and
when he woke he was ashamed, and fled away fear-
ing that 'they' would pursue him. He did not
know who 'they' were, but it seemed as if a
woman's face watched him from between the matted
boughs, and that she summoned to her side awful
companions who had never grown old through all
the ages.

He looked up, it seemed, at a smiling face that
bent over him, as he sat in the cool dark kitchen
of the old farmhouse, and wondered why the sweet-
ness of those red lips and the kindness of the eyes
mingled with the nightmare in the fort, with the
horrible Sabbath he had imagined as he lay sleep-
ing on the hot soft turf. He had allowed these
disturbed fancies, all this mad wrack of terror and

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shame that he had gathered to his mind, to trouble
him for too long a time; presently he would light
up the room, and leave all the old darkness of his
life behind him, and from henceforth he would
walk in the day.

He could still distinguish, though very vaguely,
the pile of papers before him, and he remembered,
now, that he had finished a long task that after-
noon, before he fell asleep. He could not trouble
himself to recollect the exact nature of the work,
but he was sure that he had done well; in a few
minutes, perhaps, he would strike a match, and read
the title, and amuse himself with his own forget-
fulness. But the sight of the papers lying there in
order made him think of his beginnings, of those
first unhappy efforts which were so impossible and
so hopeless. He saw himself bending over the table
in the old familiar room, desperately scribbling,
and then laying down his pen dismayed at the sad
results on the page. It was late at night, his father
had been long in bed, and the house was still. The
fire was almost out, with only a dim glow here and
there amongst the cinders, and the room was grow-
ing chilly. He rose at last from his work and
looked out on a dim earth and a dark and cloudy
sky.

Night after night he had laboured on, persever-
ing in his effort, even through the cold sickness of
despair, when every line was doomed as it was

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made. Now, with the consciousness that he knew
at least the conditions of literature, and that many
years of thought and practice had given him some
sense of language, he found these early struggles
both pathetic and astonishing. He could not under-
stand how he had persevered so stubbornly, how
he had had the heart to begin a fresh page when so
many folios of blotted, painful effort lay torn, de-
rided, impossible in their utter failure. It seemed
to him that it must have been a miracle or an in-
fernal possession, a species of madness, that had
driven him on, every day disappointed, and every
day hopeful.

And yet there was a joyous side to the illusion.
In these dry days that he lived in, when he had
bought, by a long experience and by countless hours
of misery, a knowledge of his limitations, of the
vast gulf that yawned between the conception and
the work, it was pleasant to think of a time when
all things were possible, when the most splendid
design seemed an affair of a few weeks. Now he
had come to a frank acknowledgment; so far as he
was concerned, he judged every book wholly im-
possible till the last line of it was written, and he
had learnt patience, the art of sighing and putting
the fine scheme away in the pigeon-hole of what
could never be. But to think of those days ! Then
one could plot out a book that should be more
curious than Rabelais, and jot down the outlines of

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a romance to surpass Cervantes, and design renais-
sance tragedies and volumes of contes, and comedies
of the Restoration; everything was to be done, and
the masterpiece was always the rainbow cup, a little
way before him.

He touched the manuscript on the desk, and that
feeling of the pages seemed to restore all the papers
that had been torn so long ago. It was the at-
mosphere of the silent room that returned, thj light
of the shaded candle falling on the abandoned
leaves. This had been painfully excogitated while
the snowstorm whirled about the lawn and filled the
lanes, this was of the summer night, this of the
harvest moon rising like a fire from the tithebarn on
the hill. How well he remembered those half-dozen
pages of which he had one been so proud; he had
thought out the sentences one evening, while he
leaned on the foot-bridge and watched the brook
swim across the road. Every word smelt of the
meadow-sweet that grew thick upon the banks ; now,
as he recalled the cadence and the phrase that had
seemed so charming, he saw again the ferns be-
neath the vaulted roots of the beech, and the green
light of the glowworm in the hedge.

And in the west the mountains swelled to a great
dome, and on the dome was a mound, the memorial
of some forgotten race, that grew dark and large
against the red sky, when the sun set. He had
lingered below it in the solitude, amongst the winds,

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at evening, far away from home ; and oh, the labour
and the vain efforts to make the form of it and the
awe of it in prose, to write the hush of the vast
hill, and the sadness of the world below sinking
into the night, and the mystery, the suggestion of
the rounded hillock, huge against the magic sky.

He had tried to sing in words the music that the
brook sang, and the sound of the October wind
rustling through the brown bracken on the hill.
How many pages he had covered in the effort to
show a white winter world, a sun without warmth
in a grey-blue sky, all the fields, all the land white
and shining, and one high summit where the dark
pines towered, still in the still afternoon, in the
pale violet air.

To win the secret of words, to make a phrase
that would murmur of summer and the bee, to sum-
mon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour
of the night into the surge and fall and harmony
of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of
the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager
pen.

He remembered that in some fantastic book he
had seen a bar or two of music, and beneath, the in-
scription that here was the musical expression of
Westminster Abbey. His boyish effort seemed
hardly less ambitious, and he no longer believed that
language could present the melody and the awe and
the loveliness of the earth. He had long known

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that he, at all events, would have to be content
with a far approach, with a few broken notes that
might suggest, perhaps, the magistral everlasting
song of the hill and the streams.

But in those far days the impossible was but a
part of the wonderland that lay before him, of the
world beyond the wood and the mountain. All was
to be conquered, all was to be achieved ; he had but
to make the journey and he would find the golden
world and the golden word, and hear those songs
that the sirens sang. He touched the manuscript;
whatever it was, it was the result of painful labour
and disappointment, not of the old flush of hope,
but it came of weary days, of correction and re-
correction. It might be good in its measure; but
afterwards he would write no more for a time. He
would go back again to the happy world of master-
pieces, to the dreams of great and perfect books,
written in an ecstasy.

Like a dark cloud from the sea came the mem-
ory of the attempt he had made, of the poor piteous
history that had once embittered his life. He sighed
and said alas, thinking of his folly, of the hours
when he was shaken with futile, miserable rage.
Some silly person in London had made his manu-
script more saleable and had sold it without render-
ing an account of the profits, and for that he had
been ready to curse humanity. Black, horrible, as

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the memory of a stormy day, the rage of his heart
returned to his mind, and he covered his eyes, en-
deavouring to darken the picture of terror and hate
that shone before him. He tried to drive it all
out of his thought, it vexed him to remember these
foolish trifles; the trick of a publisher, the small
pomposities and malignancies of the country folk,
the cruelty of a village boy, had inflamed him almost
to the pitch of madness. His heart had burnt with
fury, and when he looked up the sky was blotched,
and scarlet as if it rained blood.

Indeed he had almost believed that blood had
rained upon him, and cold blood from a sacrifice in
heaven; his face was wet and chill and dripping, and
he had passed his hand across his forehead and
looked at it. A red cloud had seemed to swell over
the hill, and grow great, and come near to him; he
was but an ace removed from raging madness.

It had almost come to that; the drift and the
breath of the scarlet cloud had well-nigh touched
him. It was strange that he had been so deeply
troubled by such little things, and strange how after
all the years he could still recall the anguish and
rage and hate that shook his soul as with a spiritual
tempest.

The memory of all that evening was wild and
confused; he resolved that it should vex him no
more, that now, for the last time, he would let him-

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self be tormented by the past. In a few minutes he
would rise to a new life, and forget all the storms
that had gone over him.

Curiously, every detail was distinct and clear in
his brain. The figure of the doctor driving home,
and the sounds of the few words he had spoken
came to him in the darkness, through the noise of
the storm and the pattering of the rain. Then he
stood upon the ridge of the hill and saw the smoke
drifting up from the ragged roofs of Caermaen, in
the evening calm; he listened to the voices mount-
ing thin and clear, in a weird tone, as if some out-
land folk were speaking in an unknown tongue of
awful things.

He saw the gathering darkness, the mystery of
twilight changing the huddled, sorry village into
an unearthly city, into some dreadful Atlantis, in-
habited by a ruined race. The mist falling fast,
the gloom that seemed to issue from the black
depths of the forest, to advance palpably towards
the walls, were shaped before him; and beneath,
the river wound, snake-like, about the town, swim-
ming to the flood and glowing in its still pools like
molten brass. And as the water mirrored the after-
glow and sent ripples and gouts of blood against the
shuddering reeds, there came suddenly the piercing
trumpet-call, the loud reiterated summons that rose
and fell, that called and recalled, echoing through
all the valley, crying to the dead as the last note

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The Hill of Dreams

rang. It summoned the legion from the river and
the graves and the battlefield, the host floated up
from the sea, the centuries swarmed about the
eagles, the array was set for the last great battle,
behind the leaguer of the mist.

He could imagine himself still wandering through
the dim, unknown, terrible country, gazing affrighted
at hills and woods that seemed to have put on an
unearthly shape, stumbling amongst the briars that
caught his feet. He lost his way in a wild country,
and the red lights that blazed up from the furnace
on the mountains only showed him a mysterious
land, in which he strayed aghast, with the sense of
doom weighing upon him. The dry mutter of the
trees, the sound of an unseen brook, made him
afraid as if the earth spoke of his sin, and presently
he was fleeing through a desolate shadowy wood,
where a pale light flowed from the mouldering
stumps, a dream of light that shed a ghostly ra-
diance.

And then again the dark summit of the Roman
fort, the black sheer height rising above the valley,
and the moonfire streaming around the ring of oaks,
glowing about the green bastions that guarded the
thicket and the inner place.

The room in which he sat appeared the vision,
the trouble of the wind and rain without was but
illusion, the noise of the waves in the seashell.
Passion and tears and adoration and the glories of

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The Hill of Dreams

the summer night returned, and the calm sweet face
of the woman appeared, and he thrilled at the soft
touch of her hand on his flesh.

She shone as if she had floated down into the
lane from the moon that swam between films of
cloud above the black circle of the oaks. She led
him away from all terror and despair and hate,
and gave herself to him with rapture, showing him
love, kissing his tears away, pillowing his cheek
upon her breast.

His lips dwelt upon her lips, his mouth upon the
breath of her mouth, her arms were strained about
him, and oh ! she charmed him with her voice, with
sweet kind words, as she offered her sacrifice. How
her scented hair fell down, and floated over his eyes,
and there was a marvellous fire called the moon,
and her lips were aflame, and her eyes shone like a
light on the hills.

All beautiful womanhood had come to him in
the lane. Love had touched him in the dusk and
had flown away, but he had seen the splendour
and the glory, and his eyes had seen the enchanted
light.

AVE ATQUE VALE

The old words sounded in his ears like the end-
ing of a chant, and he heard the music close. Once

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The Hill of Dreams

only in his weary hapless life, once the world had
passed away, and he had known her, the dear, dear
Annie, the symbol of all mystic womanhood.

The heaviness of languor still oppressed him,
holding him back amongst these old memories, so
that he could not stir from his place. Oddly, there
seemed something unaccustomed about the darkness
of the room, as if the shadows he had summoned
had changed the aspect of the walls. He was con-
scious that on this night he was not altogether him-
self; fatigue and the weariness of sleep, and the
waking vision had perplexed him. He remembered
how once or twice when he was a little boy he had
opened his eyes on the midnight darkness startled
by an uneasy dream, and had stared with a
frightened gaze into nothingness, not knowing where
he was, all trembling, and breathing quick, till he
touched the rail of his bed, and the familiar out-
lines of the looking-glass and the chiffonier began
to glimmer out of the gloom. So now he touched
the pile of manuscript and the desk at which he had
worked so many hours, and felt reassured, though
he smiled at himself, and he felt the old childish
dread, the longing to cry out for some one to bring
a candle, and show him that he really was in his
own room. He glanced up for an instant, expect-
ing to see perhaps the glitter of the brass gas jet
that was fixed in the wall, just beside his bureau, but

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The Hill of Dreams

it was too dark, and he could not rouse himself and
make the effort that would drive the cloud and the
muttering thoughts away.

He leant back again, picturing the wet street
without, the rain driving like fountain spray about
the gas lamp, the shrilling of the wind on those
waste places to the north. It was strange how in
the brick and stucco desert where no trees were, he
all the time imagined the noise of tossing boughs, the
grinding of the boughs together. There was a
great storm and tumult in this wilderness of London,
and for the sound of the rain and the wind he
could not hear the hum and jangle of the trams,
and the jar and shriek of the garden gates as they
opened and shut. But he could imagine his street,
the rain-swept desolate curve of it, as it turned
northward, and beyond, the empty suburban roads,
the twinkling villa windows, the ruined field, the
broken lane, and then yet another suburb rising, a
solitary gas-lamp glimmering at a corner, and the
plane tree lashing its boughs, and driving great
showers against the glass.

It was wonderful to think of. For when these
remote roads were ended one dipped down the hill
into the open country, into the dim world beyond the
glint of the friendly fires. To-night, how waste
they were, these wet roads, edged with the red-
brick houses, with shrubs whipped by the wind
against one another, against the paling and the wall.

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The Hill of Dreams

There the wind swayed the great elms scattered on
the sidewalk, the remnants of the old stately fields,
and beneath each tree was a pool of wet, and a
torrent of raindrops fell with every gust. And
one passed through the red avenues, perhaps by a
little settlement of flickering shops, and passed the
last sentinel wavering lamp, and the road became a
ragged lane, and the storm screamed from hedge to
hedge across the open fields. And then, beyond, one
touched again upon a still remoter avant-guard of
London, an island amidst the darkness, surrounded
by its pale of twinkling starry lights.

He remembered his wanderings amongst these
outposts of the town, and thought how desolate
all their ways must be to-night. They were solitary
in wet and wind, and only at long intervals some
one pattered and hurried along them, bending his
eyes down to escape the drift of rain. Within the
villas, behind the close-drawn curtains, they drew
about the fire, and wondered at the violence of the
storm, listening for each great gust as it gathered
far away, and rocked the trees, and at last rushed
with a huge shock against their walls as if it were
the coming of the sea. He thought of himself walk-
ing, as he had often walked, from lamp to lamp on
such a night, treasuring his lonely thoughts, and
weighing the hard task awaiting him in his room.
Often in the evening, after a long day's labour, he
had thrown down his pen in utter listlessness, feel-

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The Hill of Dreams

ing that he could struggle no more with ideas and
words, and he had gone out into driving rain and
darkness, seeking the word of the enigma as he
tramped on and on beneath these outer battlements
of London.

Or on some grey afternoon in March or Novem-
ber he had sickened of the dull monotony and the
stagnant life that he saw from his window, and had
taken his design with him to the lonely places, halt-
ing now and again by a gate, and pausing in the
shelter of a hedge through which the austere wind
shivered, while, perhaps, he dreamed of Sicily, or
of sunlight on the Provencal olives. Often as he
strayed solitary from street to field, and passed the
Syrian fig tree imprisoned in Britain, nailed to an
ungenial wall, the solution of the puzzle became
evident, and he laughed, and hurried home eager to
make the page speak, to note the song he had
heard on his way.

Sometimes he spent many hours treading this
edge and brim of London, now lost amidst the dun
fields, watching the bushes shaken by the wind, and
now looking down from a height whence he could
see the dim waves of the town, and a barbaric water
tower rising from a hill, and the snuff-coloured cloud
of smoke that seemed blown up from the streets into
the sky.

There were certain ways and places that he had
cherished; he loved a great old common that stood

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on high ground, curtained about with ancient spa-
cious houses of red brick, and their cedarn gardens.
And there was on a road that led to this common
a space of ragged uneven ground with a pool and
a twisted oak, and here he had often stayed in
autumn and looked across the mist and the valley at
the great theatre of the sunset, where a red cloud
like a charging knight shone and conquered a purple
dragon shape, and golden lances glittered in a field
of faery green.

Or sometimes, when the unending prospect of
trim, monotonous, modern streets had wearied him,
he had found an immense refreshment in the dis-
covery of a forgotten hamlet, left in a hollow, while
all new London pressed and serged on every side,
threatening the rest of the red roofs with its vulgar
growth. These little peaceful houses, huddled to-
gether beneath the shelter of trees, with their bulg-
ing leaded windows and uneven roofs, somehow
brought back to him the sense of the country, and
soothed him with the thought of the old farm-houses,
white or grey, the homes of quiet lives, harbours
where, perhaps, no tormenting thoughts ever broke
in.

For he had instinctively determined that there was
neither rest nor health in all the arid waste of streets
about him. It seemed as if in those dull rows of
dwellings, in the prim new villas red and white and
staring, there must be a leaven working which trans-

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The Hill of Dreams

formed all to base vulgarity. Beneath the dull sad
slates, behind the blistered doors, love turned to
squalid intrigue, mirth to drunken clamour, and the
mystery of life became a common thing; religion
was sought for in the greasy piety and flatulent ora-
tory of the Independent chapel, the stuccoed night-
mare of the Doric columns. Nothing fine, nothing
rare, nothing exquisite, it seemed, could exist in the
weltering surburban sea, in the habitations which
had risen from the stench and slime of the brick-
fields. It was as if the sickening fumes that steamed
from the burning bricks had been sublimed into the
shape of houses, and those who lived in these grey
places could also claim kinship with the putrid mud.
Hence he had delighted in the few remains of
the past that he could find still surviving on the
suburb's edge, in the grave old houses that stood,
apart from the road, in the mouldering taverns of
the eighteenth century, in the huddled hamlets that
had preserved only the glow and the sunlight of all
the years that had passed over them. It appeared
to him that vulgarity, and greasiness and squalor
had come with a flood, that not only the good but
also the evil in man's heart had been made common
and ugly, that a sordid scum was mingled with all
the springs, of death as of life. It would be alike
futile to search amongst these mean two-storied
houses for a splendid sinner as for a splendid saint;

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the very vices of these people smelt of cabbage water
and a pothouse vomit.

And so he had often fled away from the serried
maze that encircled him, seeking for the old and
worn and significant as an antiquary looks for the
fragments of the Roman temple amidst the modern
shops. In some way the gusts of wind and the
beating rain of the night reminded him of an old
house that had often attracted him with a strange
indefinable curiosity. He had found it on a grim
grey day in March, when he had gone out under a
leaden-moulded sky, cowering from a dry freezing
wind that brought with it the gloom and the doom
of far unhappy Siberian plains. More than ever
that day the suburb had oppressed him ; insignificant,
detestable, repulsive to body and mind, it was the
only hell that a vulgar age could conceive or make,
an inferno created not by Dante but by the jerry-
builder. He had gone out to the north, and when
he lifted up his eyes again he found that he had
chanced to turn up by one of the little lanes that
still strayed across the broken fields. He had never
chosen this path before because the lane at its out-
let was so wholly degraded and offensive, littered
with rusty tins and broken crockery, and hedged in
with a paling fashioned out of scraps of wire, rot-
ting timber, and bending worn-out rails. But on
this day, by happy chance, he had fled from the

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high road by the first opening that offered, and he
no longer groped his way amongst obscene refuse,
sickened by the bloated bodies of dead dogs, and
fetid odours from unclean decay, but the malpassage
had become a peaceful winding lane, with warm
shelter beneath its banks from the dismal wind. For
a mile he had walked on quietly, and then a turn in
the road showed him a little glen or hollow, watered
by such a tiny rushing brooklet as his own woods
knew, and beyond, alas, the glaring foreguard of a
"new neighbourhood" ; raw red villas, semi-detached,
and then a row of lamentable shops.

But as he was about to turn back, in the hope of
finding some other outlet, his attention was charmed
by a small house that stood back a little from the
road on his right hand. There had been a white
gate, but the paint had long faded to grey and black
and the wood crumbled under the touch, and only
moss marked out the lines of the drive. The iron
railing round the lawn had fallen, and the poor
flower-beds were choked with grass and a faded
growth of weeds. But here and there a rosebush
lingered amidst suckers that had sprung grossly
from the root, and on each side of the hall door
were box trees, untrimmed, ragged, but still green.
The slate roof was all stained and livid, blotched
with the drippings of a great elm that stood at one
corner of the neglected lawn, and marks of damp
and decay were thick on the uneven walls, which

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had been washed yellow many years before. There
was a porch of trellis work before the door, and
Lucian had seen it rock in the wind, swaying as if
every gust must drive it down. There were two
windows on the ground floor, one on each side of
the door, and two above, with a blind space where a
central window had been blocked up.

This poor and desolate house had fascinated him.
Ancient and poor and fallen, disfigured by the slate
roof and the yellow wash that had replaced the old
mellow dipping tiles and the warm red walls, and
disfigured again by spots and patches of decay; it
seemed as if its happy days were forever ended.
To Lucian it appealed with a sense of doom and hor-
ror; the black streaks that crept upon the walls, and
the green drift upon the roof, appeared not so much
the work of foul weather and dripping boughs, as
the outward signs of evil working and creeping in
the lives of those within.

The stage seemed to him decked for doom,
painted with the symbols of tragedy; and he
wondered as he looked whether any one were so
unhappy as to live there still. There were torn
blinds in the windows, but he had asked himself,
who could be so brave as to sit in that room,
darkened by the dreary box, and listen of winter
nights to the rain upon the window, and the moan-
ing of wind amongst the tossing boughs that beat
against the roof.

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He could not imagine that any chamber in such a
house "was habitable. (Here the dead had lain,
through the white blind the thin light had filtered
on the rigid mouth, and still the floor must be wet
with tears and still that great rocking elm echoed
the groaning and the sobs of those who watched.
No doubt, the damp was rising, and the odour of
the earth filled the house, and made such as entered
draw back, foreseeing the hour of death.

Often the thought of this strange old house had
haunted him, he had imagined the empty rooms
where a heavy paper peeled from the walls and
hung in dark strips; and he could not believe that
a light ever shone from those windows that stared
black and glittering on the neglected lawn. But
to-night the wet and the storm seemed curiously to
bring the image of the place before him, and as
the wind sounded he thought how unhappy those
must be, if any there were, who sat in the musty
chambers by a flickering light, and listened to the
elm-tree moaning and beating and weeping on the
walls.

And to-night was Saturday night; and there
was about that phrase something that muttered of
the condemned cell, of the agony of a doomed man.
Ghastly to his eyes was the conception of any one
sitting in that room to the right of the door behind
the larger box tree, where the wall was cracked

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above the window and smeared with a black stain
in an ugly shape.

He knew how foolish it had been in the first
place to trouble his mind with such conceits of a
dreary cottage on the outskirts of London. And
it was more foolish now to meditate these things,
fantasies, feigned forms, the issue of a sad mood
and a bleak day of spring. For soon, in a few
moments, he was to rise to a new life. He was
but reckoning up the account of his past, and when
the light came he was to think no more of sorrow
and heaviness, of real or imagined terrors. He
had stayed too long in London, and he would once
more taste the breath of the hills, and see the river
winding in the long lovely valley; ah! he would go
home.

Something like a thrill, the thrill of fear, passed
over him as he remembered that there was no home.
It was in the winter, a year and a half after his
arrival in town, that he had suffered the loss of his
father. He lay for many days prostrate, over-
whelmed with sorrow and with the thought that
now indeed he was utterly alone in the world.
Miss Deacon was to live with another cousin in
Yorkshire; the old home was at last ended and
done. He felt sorry that he had not written more
frequently to his father: there were things in his
cousins letters that had made his heart sore. 'Your

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poor father was always looking for your letters,'
she wrote, 'they used to cheer him so much. He
nearly broke down when you sent him that money
last Christmas ; he got it into his head that you were
starving yourself to send it to him. He was hoping
so much that you would have come down this
Christmas, and kept asking me about the plum-pud-
dings months ago.'

It was not only his father that had died, but
with him the last strong link was broken, and the
past life, the days of his boyhood, grew faint as a
dream. With his father his mother died again,
and the long years died, the time of his innocence,
the memory of affection. He was sorry that his
letters had gone home so rarely; it hurt him to im-
agine his father looking out when the post came
in the morning, and forced to be sad because there
was nothing. But he had never thought that his
father valued the few lines that he wrote, and in-
deed it was often difficult to know what to say. It
would have been useless to write of those agonising
nights when the pen seemed an awkward and out-
landish instrument, when every effort ended in
shameful defeat, or of the happier hours when at
last wonder appeared and the line glowed, crowned
and exalted. To poor Mr. Taylor such tales
would have seemed but trivial histories of some
Oriental game, like an odd story from a land where
men have time for the infinitely little, and can se-

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riously make a science of arranging blossoms in
a jar, and discuss perfumes instead of politics.
It would have been useless to write to the rec-
tory of his only interest, and so he wrote sel-
dom.

And then he had been sorry because he could
never write again and never see his home. He had
wondered whether he would have gone down to
the old place at Christmas, if his father had lived.
It was curious how common things evoked the bit-
terest griefs, but his father's anxiety that the plum-
pudding should be good, and ready for him, had
brought the tears into his eyes. He could hear
him saying in a nervous voice that attempted to be
cheerful: 'I suppose you will be thinking of the
Christmas puddings soon, Jane; you remember how
fond Lucian used to be of plum-pudding. I hope
we shall see him this December.' No doubt poor
Miss Deacon paled with rage at the suggestion that
she should make Christmas pudding in July; and
returned a sharp answer; but it was pathetic. The
wind wailed, and the rain dashed and beat again
and again upon the window. He imagined that all
his thoughts of home, of the old rectory amongst
the elms, had conjured into his mind the sound of
the storm upon the trees, for, to-night, very clearly
he heard the creaking of the boughs, the noise of
boughs moaning and beating and weeping on the
walls, and even a pattering of wet, on wet earth,

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as if there were a shrub near the window that
shook off the raindrops, before the gust.

That thrill, as it were a shudder of fear, passed
over him again, and he knew not what had made
him afraid. There was some dark shadow on his
mind that saddened him, it seemed as if a vague
memory of terrible days hung like a cloud over his
thought, but it was all indefinite, perhaps the last
grim and ragged edge of the melancholy wrack
that had swelled over his life and the bygone years.
He shivered and tried to rouse himself and drive
away the sense of dread and shame that seemed
so real and so awful, and yet he could not grasp
it. But the torpor of sleep, the burden of the work
that he had ended a few hours before still weighed
down his limbs and bound his thoughts. He could
scarcely believe that he had been busy at his desk
a little while ago, and that just before the winter
day closed in and the rain began to fall he had laid
down the pen with a sigh of relief, and had slept
in his chair. It was rather as if he had slumbered
deeply through a long and weary night, as if an
awful vision of flame and darkness and the worm
that dieth not had come to him sleeping. But he
would dwell no more on the darkness; he went back
to the early days in London when he had said fare-
well to the hills and to the waterpools, and had
set to work in this little room in the dingy street.

How he had toiled and laboured at the desk
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before him ! He had put away the old wild hopes
of the masterpiece conceived and executed in a fury
of inspiration, wrought out in one white heat of
creative joy; it was enough if by dint of long per-
severance and singleness of desire he could at last,
in pain and agony and despair, after failure and
disappointment and effort constantly renewed, fash-
ion something of which he need not be ashamed.
He had put himself to school again, and had, with
what patience he could command, ground his teeth
into the rudiments, resolved that at last he would
tear out the heart of the mystery. They were
good nights to remember, these; he was glad to
think of the little ugly room, with its silly wall-
paper and its 'bird's-eye' furniture, lighted up,
while he sat at the bureau and wrote on into the
cold stillness of the London morning, when the
flickering lamp-light and the daystar shone together.
It was an interminable labour, and he had always
known it to be as hopeless as alchemy. The gold,
the great and glowing masterpiece, would never
shine amongst the dead ashes and smoking efforts
of the crucible, but in the course of the life, in the!
interval between the failures, he might possibly
discover curious things.

These were the good nights that he could look
back on without fear or shame, when he had been
happy and content on a diet of bread and tea and
tobacco, and could hear of some imbecility passing

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into its hundredth thousand, and laugh cheerfully
— if only that last page had been imagined aright,
if the phrases noted in the still hours rang out
their music when he read them in the morning. He
remembered the drolleries and fantasies that the
worthy Miss Deacon used to write to him, and how
he had grinned at her words of reproof, admoni-
tion, and advice. She had once instigated Dolly
fits to pay him a visit, and that young prop of re-<
spectability had talked about the extraordinary run-
ning of Bolter at the Scurragh meeting in Ireland;
and then, glancing at Lucian's books, had inquired
whether any of them had 'warm bits.' He had
been kind though patronising, and seemed to have
moved freely in the most brilliant society of Stoke
Newington. He had not been able to give any
information as to the present condition of Edgar
Allan Poe's old school. It appeared eventually that
his report at home had not been a very favourable
one, for no invitation to high tea had followed, as
Miss Deacon had hoped. The Dollys knew many
nice people, who were well off, and Lucian's cousin,
as she afterwards said, had done her best to intro-
duce him to the beau monde of those northern
suburbs.

But after the visit of the young Dolly, with what
joy he had returned to the treasures which he had
concealed from profane eyes. He had looked out
and seen his visitor on board the tram at the street

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The Hill of Dreams

corner, and he laughed out loud, and locked his
door. There had been moments when he was
lonely, and wished to hear again the sound of
friendly speech; but after such an irruption of sub-
urban futility, it was a keen delight to feel that
he could absorb himself in his wonderful task as
safe and silent as if he were in mid-desert.

But there was one period that he dared not re-
vive; he could not bear to think of those weeks of
desolation and terror in the winter after his coming
to London. His mind was sluggish, and he could
not quite remember how many years had passed
since that dismal experience; it sounded all an old
story, but yet it was still vivid, a flaming scroll of
terror from which he turned his eyes away. One
awful scene glowed into his memory, and he could
not shut out the sight of an orgy, of dusky figures
whirling in a ring, of lurid naphtha flares blazing
in the darkness, of great glittering lamps, like in-
fernal thuribles, very slowly swaying in a violent
blast of air. And there was something else, some-
thing which he could not remember, but it filled him
with terror, but it slunk in the dark places of his
soul, as a wild beast crouches in the depths of a
cave.

Again, and without reason, he began to image
to himself that old mouldering house in the field.
With what a loud incessant noise the wind must
be clamouring about on this fearful night, how the

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The Hill of Dreams

great elm swayed and cried in the storm, and the
rain dashed and pattered on the windows, and
dripped on the sodden earth from the shaking
shrubs beside the door. He moved uneasily on
his chair, and struggled to put the picture out of
his thoughts; but in spite of himself he saw the
stained uneven walls, that ugly blot of mildew
above the window, and perhaps a feeble gleam of
light filtered through the blind, and some one, un-
happy above all and forever lost, sat within the
dismal room. Or rather, every window was black,
without a glimmer of hope, and he who was shut
in thick darkness heard the wind and the rain, and
the noise of the elm-tree moaning and beating and
weeping on the walls.

For all his effort the impression would not leave
him, and as he sat before his desk looking into
the vague darkness he could almost see that cham-
ber which he had so often imagined; the low white-
washed ceiling held up by a heavy beam, the smears
of smoke and long usage, the cracks and fissures
of the plaster. Old furniture, shabby, deplorable,
battered, stood about the room; there was a horse-
hair sofa worn and tottering, and a dismal paper,
patterned in livid red, blackened and mouldered
near the floor, and peeled off and hung in strips
from the dank walls. And there was that odour
of decay, of the rank soil steaming, of rotting

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The Hill of Dreams

wood, a vapour that choked the breath and made
the heart full of fear and heaviness.

Lucian again shivered with a thrill of dread;
he was afraid that he had overworked himself and
that he was suffering from the first symptoms of
grave illness. His mind dwelt on confused and
terrible recollections, and with a mad ingenuity
gave form and substance to phantoms; and even
now he drew a long breath, almost imagining that
the air in his room was heavy and noisome, that
it entered his nostrils with some taint of the crypt.
And his body was still languid, and though he made
a half a motion to rise he could not find enough
energy for the effort, and he sank again into the
chair. At all events, he would think no more of
that sad house in the field; he would return to
those long struggles with letters, to the happy
nights when he had gained victories.

He remembered something of his escape from
the desolation and the worse than desolation that
had obsessed him during that first winter in Lon-
don. He had gone free one bleak morning in
February, and after those dreary terrible weeks the
desk and the heap and litter of papers had once
more engulfed and absorbed him. And in the suc-
ceeding summer, of a night when he lay awake
and listened to the birds, shining images came
wantonly to him. For an hour, while the dawn

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The Hill of Dreams

brightened, he had felt the presence of an age, the
resurrection of the life that the green fields had
hidden, and his heart stirred for joy when he knew
that he held and possessed all the loveliness that
had so long mouldered. He could scarcely fall
asleep for eager and leaping thoughts, and as soon
as his breakfast was over he went out and bought
paper and pens of a certain celestial stationer in
Netting Hill. The street was not changed as he
passed to and fro on his errand. The rattling
wagons jolted by at intervals, a rare hansom came
spinning down from London, there sounded the
same hum and jangle of the gliding trams. The
languid life of the pavement was unaltered; a few
people, unclassed, without salience or possible de-
scription, lounged and walked from east to west,
and from west to east, or slowly dropped into the
byways to wander in the black waste to the north,
or perhaps to go astray in the systems that stretched
towards the river. He glanced down these by-
roads as he passed, and was astonished, as always,
at their mysterious and desert aspect. Some were
utterly empty; lines of neat, appalling residences,
trim and garnished as if for occupation, edging the
white glaring road; and not a soul was abroad, and
not a sound broke their stillness. It was a picture
of the desolation of midnight lighted up, but empty
and waste as the most profound and solemn hours
before the day. Other of these by-roads, of older

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settlement, were furnished with more important
houses, standing far back from the pavement, each
in a little wood of greenery, and thus one might
look down as through a forest vista, and see a way
smooth and guarded with low walls and yet un-
trodden, and all a leafy silence. Here and there
in some of these echoing roads a figure seemed
lazily advancing in the distance, hesitating and
delaying, as if lost in the labyrinth. It was difficult
to say which were the more dismal, these deserted
streets that wandered away to right and left, or the
great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and
shadowy life. For the latter appeared vast, inter-
minable, grey, and those who travelled by it were
scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but rather the
uncertain and misty shapes that come and go across
the desert in an Eastern tale, when men look up
from the sand and see a caravan pass them, all in
silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they
passed and repassed each other on those pavements,
appearing and vanishing, each intent on his own
secret, and wrapped in obscurity. One might have
sworn that not a man saw his neighbor who met
him or jostled him, that here every one was a
phantom for the other, though the lines of their
paths crossed, and recrossed, and their eyes stared
like the eyes of live men. When two went by to-
gether, they mumbled and cast distrustful glances
behind them as though afraid all the world was

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The Hill of Dreams

an enemy, and the pattering of feet was like the
noise of a shower of rain. Curious appearances
and simulations of life gathered at points in the
road, for at intervals the villas ended and shops
began in a dismal row, and looked so hopeless that
one wondered who could buy. There were women
fluttering uneasily about the greengrocers, and
shabby things in rusty black touched and retouched
the red lumps that an unshaven butcher offered,
and already in the corner public there was a con-
fused noise, with a tossing of voices that rose and
fell like a Jewish chant, with the senseless stir of
marionettes jerked into an imitation of gaiety.
Then, in crossing a side street that seemed like
grey mid-winter in stone, he trespassed from one
world to another, for an old decayed house amidst
its garden held the opposite corner. The laurels
had grown into black skeletons, patched with green
drift, the ilex gloomed over the porch, the deodar
had blighted the flower-beds. Dark ivies swarmed
over an elm-tree, and a brown clustering fungus
sprang in gross masses on the lawn, showing where
the roots of dead trees mouldered. The blue ver-
andah, the blue balcony over the door, had faded
to grey, and the stucco was blotched with ugly
marks of weather, and a dank smell of decay, that
vapour of black rotten earth in old town gardens,
hung heavy about the gates. And then a row of
musty villas had pushed out in shops to the pave-

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The Hill of Dreams

ment, and the things in faded black buzzed and
stirred about the limp cabbages, and the red lumps
of meat.

It was the same terrible street, whose pavements
he had trodden so often, where sunshine seemed
but a gaudy light, where the fume of burning bricks
always drifted. On black winter nights he had
seen the sparse lights glimmering through the rain
and drawing close together, as the dreary road
vanished in long perspective. Perhaps this was
its most appropriate moment, when nothing of its
smug villas and skeleton shops remained but the
bright patches of their windows, when the old house
amongst its mouldering shrubs was but a dark cloud,
and the streets to north and south seemed like starry
wastes, beyond them the blackness of infinity. Al-
ways in the daylight it had been to him abhorred
and abominable, and its grey houses and purlieus
had been fungus-like sproutings, and the efflores-
cence of horrible decay.

But on that bright morning neither the dreadful
street nor those who moved about it appalled
him. He returned joyously to his den, and rever-
ently laid out the paper on his desk. The world
about him was but a grey shadow hovering on a
shining wall; its noises were faint as the rustling
of trees in a distant wood. The lovely and exqui-
site forms of those who served the Amber Venus
were his distinct, clear, and manifest visions, and

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The Hill of Dreams

for one amongst them who came to him in a fire
of bronze hair his heart stirred with the adoration
of love. She it was who stood forth from all the
rest and fell down prostrate before the radiant
form in amber, drawing out her pins in curious gold,
her glowing brooches of enamel, and pouring from
a silver box all her treasure of jewels and precious
stones, chrysoberyl and sardonyx, opal and diamond,
topaz and pearl. And then she stripped from her
body her precious robes and stood before the god-
dess in the glowing mist of her hair, praying that
to her who had given all and came naked to the
shrine, love might be given, and the grace of Venus.
And when at last, after strange adventures, her
prayer was granted, then when the sweet light came
from the sea, and her lover turned at dawn to that
bronze glory, he saw beside him a little statuette of
amber. And in the shrine far in Britain where
the black rains stained the marble, they found the
splendid and sumptuous statue of the Golden Venus,
the last fine robe of silk that the lady had dedicated
falling from her fingers, and the jewels lying at
her feet. And her face was like the lady's face
when the sun had brightened it on that day of her
devotion.

The bronze mist glimmered before Lucian's eyes;
he felt as though the soft floating hair touched his
forehead and his lips and his hands. The fume
of burning bricks, the reek of cabbage water, never

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The Hill of Dreams

reached his nostrils that were filled with the per-
fume of rare unguents, with the breath of the violet
sea in Italy. His pleasure was an inebriation, an
ecstasy of joy that destroyed all the vile Hottentot
kraals and mud avenues as with one white light-
ning flash, and through the hours of that day he sat
enthralled, not contriving a story with patient art,
but rapt into another time, and entranced by the
ardent gleam in the lady's eyes.

The little tale of The Amber Statuette had at
last issued from a humble office in the spring after
his father's death. The author was utterly un-
known; the author's Murray was a wholesale sta-
tioner and printer in process of development, so
that Lucian was astonished when the book became
a moderate success. The reviewers had been sadly
irritated, and even now he recollected with cheer-
fulness an article in an influential daily paper, an
article pleasantly headed: 'Where are the disin-
fectants ?'

And then — but all the months afterwards seemed
doubtful, there were only broken revelations of the
laborious hours renewed, and the white nights when
he had seen the moonlight fade and the gaslight
grow wan at the approach of dawn.

He listened. Surely that was the sound of rain
falling on sodden ground, the heavy sound of great
swollen drops driven down from wet leaves by the
gust of wind, and then again the strain of boughs

26l

The Hill of Dreams

sang above the tumult of the air, there was a doleful
noise as if the storm shook the masts of a ship. He
had only to get up and look out of the window and
he would see the treeless empty street, and the rain
starring the puddles under the gas-lamp, but he
would wait a little while.

He tried to think why, in spite of all his reso-
lutions, a dark horror seemed to brood more and
more over all his mind. How often he had sat and
worked on just such nights as this, contented if the
words were in accord though the wind might wail,
though the air were black with rain. Even about
the little book that he had made there seemed some
taint, some shuddering memory, that came to him
across the gulf of forgetfulness. Somehow the
remembrance of the offering to Venus, of the
phrases that he had so lovingly invented, brought
back again the dusky figures that danced in the orgy,
beneath the brassy glittering lamps; and again the
naphtha flares showed the way to the sad house in
the fields, and the red glare lit up the mildewed walls
and the black hopeless windows. He gasped for
breath, he seemed to inhale a heavy air that reeked
of decay and rottenness, and the odour of the clay
was in his nostrils.

That unknown cloud that had darkened his
thoughts grew blacker and engulfed him, despair was
heavy upon him, his heart fainted with a horrible
dread. In a moment, it seemed, a veil would be

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drawn away and certain awful things would appear.

He strove to rise from his chair, to cry out, but
he could not. Deep, deep the darkness closed upon
him, and the storm sounded far away. The Roman
fort surged up, terrific, and he saw the writhing
boughs in a ring, and behind them a glow and heat
of fire. There were hideous shapes that swarmed
in the thicket of the oaks; they called and beckoned
to him, and rose into the air, into the flame that
was smitten from heaven about the walls. And
amongst them was the form of the beloved, but
jets of flame issued from her breast, and beside
her was a horrible old woman, naked; and they,
too, summoned him to mount the hill.

He heard Dr. Burrows whispering of the strange
things that had been found in old Mrs. Gibbon's
cottage, obscene figures, and unknown contrivances.
She was a witch, he said, and the mistress of the
witches.

He fought against the nightmare, against the
illusion that bewildered him. All his life, he
thought, had been an evil dream, and for the
common world he had fashioned an unreal red gar-
ment, that burned in his eyes. Truth and the
dream were so mingled that now he could not di-
vide one from the other. He had let Annie drink
his soul beneath the hill, on the night when the
moonfire shone, but he had not surely seen her ex-
alted in the flame, the Queen of the Sabbath.

263

The Hill of Dreams

Dimly he remembered Dr. Burrows coming to see
him in London, but had he not imagined all the
rest?

Again he found himself in the dusky lane, and
Annie floated down to him from the moon above
the hill. His head sank upon her breast again,
but, alas, it was aflame. And he looked down, and
he saw that his own flesh was aflame, and he knew
that the fire could never be quenched.

There was a heavy weight upon his head, his
feet were nailed to the floor, and his arms bound
tight beside him. He seemed to himself to rage
and struggle with the strength of a madman; but
his hand only stirred and quivered a little as it lay
upon the desk.

Again he was astray in the mist; wandering
through the waste avenues of a city that had been
ruined from ages. It had been splendid as Rome,
terrible as Babylon, and forever the darkness had
covered it, and it lay desolate forever in the ac-
cursed plain. And far and far the grey passages
stretched into the night, into the icy fields, into the
place of eternal gloom.

Ring within ring the awful temple closed around
him; unending circles of vast stones, circle within
circle, and every circle loss throughout all ages.
In the centre was the sanctuary of the infernal
rite, and he was borne thither as in the eddies of
a whirlpool, to consummate his ruin, to celebrate

264

The Hill of Dreams

the wedding of the Sabbath. He flung up his arms
and beat the air, resisting with all his strength,
with muscles that could throw down mountains;
and this time his little finger stirred for an instant,
and his foot twitched upon the floor.

Then suddenly a flaring street shone before him.
There was darkness round about him, but it flamed
with hissing jets of light and naphtha fires, and
great glittering lamps swayed very slowly in a vio-
lent blast of air. A horrible music, and the ex-
ultation of discordant voices, swelled in his ears,
and he saw an uncertain tossing crowd of dusky
figures that circled and leapt before him. There
was a noise like the chant of the lost, and then
there appeared in the midst of the orgy, beneath a
red flame, the figure of a woman. Her bronze
hair and flushed cheeks were illuminate, and an
argent light shone from her eyes, and with a smile
that froze his heart her lips opened to speak to
him. The tossing crowd faded away, falling into
a gulf of darkness, and then she drew out from
her hair pins of curious gold, and glowing brooches
in enamel, and poured out jewels before him from
a silver box, and then she stripped from her body
her precious robes, and stood in the glowing mist
of her hair, and held out her arms to him. But
he raised his eyes and saw the mould and decay
gaining on the walls of a dismal room, and a
gloomy paper was dropping to the rotting floor.

265

The Hill of Dreams

A vapour of the grave entered his nostrils, and he
cried out with a loud scream; but there was only
an indistinct guttural murmur in his throat.

And presently the woman fled away from him,
and he pursued her. She fled away before him
through midnight country, and he followed after
her, chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley
to valley. And at last he captured her and won
her with horrible caresses, and they went up to
celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath.
They were within the matted thicket, and they
writhed in the flames, insatiable, forever. They
were tortured, and tortured one another, in the
sight of thousands who gathered thick about them;
and their desire rose up like a black smoke.

Without, the storm swelled to the roaring of an
awful sea, the wind grew to a shrill long scream,
the elm-tree was riven and split with the crash of
a thunderclap. To Lucian the tumult and the
shock came as a gentle murmur, as if a brake stirred
before a sudden breeze in summer. And then a
vast silence overwhelmed him.

A few minutes later there was a shuffling of
feet in the passage, and the door was softly opened.
A woman came in, holding a light, and she peered
curiously at the figure sitting quite still in the chair
before the desk. The woman was half dressed,
and she had let her splendid bronze hair flow down,

266

The Hill of Dreams

her cheeks were flushed, and as she advanced into
the shabby room, the lamp she carried cast quaking
shadows on the mouldering paper, patched with
marks of rising damp, and hanging in strips from
the wet, dripping wall. The blind had not been
drawn, but no light nor glimmer of light filtered
the window, for a great straggling box tree that
beat the rain upon the panes shut out even the night.
The woman came softly, and as she bent down
over Lucian an argent gleam shone from her brown
eyes, and the little curls upon her neck were like
golden work upon marble. She put her hand to
his heart, and looked up, and beckoned to some
one who was waiting by the door.

'Come in, Joe,' she said. 'It's just as I thought
it would be: "Death by misadventure";' and she
held up a little empty bottle of dark blue glass
that was standing on the desk. 'He would take
it, and I always knew he would take a drop too much
one of these days.'

'What's all those papers that he's got there?'

'Didn't I tell you? It was crool to see him.
He'd got it into 'is 'ead he could write a book; he's
been at it for the last six months. Look 'ere.'

She spread the neat pile of manuscript broadcast
over the desk, and took a sheet at haphazard. It
was all covered with illegible hopeless scribblings;
only here and there it was possible to recognise a
word.

267

The Hill of Dreams

'Why, nobody could read it, if they wanted to.'
'It's all like that. He thought it was beautiful.
I used to 'ear him jabbering to himself about it,
dreadful nonsense it was he used to talk. I did
my best to tongue him out of it, but it wasn't any
good.'

'He must have been a bit dotty. He's left you
everything?'
'Yes.'

'You'll have to see about the funeral.'
'There'll be the inquest and all that first.'
'You've got evidence to show he took the stuff.'
'Yes, to be sure I have. The doctor told him he
would be certain to do for himself, and he was
found two or three times quite silly in the streets.
They had to drag him away from a house in Halden
Road. He was carrying on dreadful, shaking at the
gaite, and calling out it was 'is 'ome and they
wouldn't let him in. I heard Dr. Manning myself
tell 'im in this very room that he'd kill 'imself one of
these days. Joe ! Aren't you ashaimed of yourself.
I declare you're quite rude, and it's almost Sunday
too. Bring the light over here, can't you ?'

The man took up the blazing paraffin lamp, and
set it on the desk, beside the scattered heap of that
terrible manuscript. The flaring light shone
through the dead eyes into the dying brain, and
there was a glow within, as if great furnace doors
were opened.

268

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